[Illustration:  Churning.  From A Pastel by Jean Francois Millet, in the Luxembourg Gallery, Paris.

Delightful for a sense of air through the cool and spacious room, and for the sculpturesque solidity of the group composed of the woman, the churn, and the cat.]

“And you have not seen it since you were a boy?” I asked.

“No; but it all comes back to me as I work,” was his answer.

From picture to picture, from question to kindly answer, the afternoon sped, and at length, in response to a question as to the relative importance of subject, the painter sent his son into the house whence he returned with a panel a few inches square.  The father took it, wiped the dust from it, absent-mindedly, on his sleeve, with a half caressing movement, and placed it on the easel. “Voila! (There!)” was all he said.  The panel represented three golden juicy pears, their fat sides relieved one against the other, forming a compact group which, through the magic of color, told of autumn sun, and almost gave the odor of ripened fruit.  It was a lovely bit of painting, and much interested, I said:  “Pardon me, but you seem as much or more proud of this than anything you have shown.”

“Exactly,” answered Millet, with an amused smile at my eagerness.  “Everything in nature is good to paint, and the painter’s business is to be occupied with his manner of rendering it.  These pears, a man or a woman, a flock of sheep, all have the same qualities for a painter.  There are,” with a gesture of his hands to make his meaning clear, “things that lie flat, that are horizontal, like a plain; and there are others which stand up, are perpendicular; and there are the planes between:  all of which should be expressed in a picture.  There are the distances between objects also.  But all this can be found in the simplest thing as in the most complicated.”

“But,” I again ventured, “surely some subjects are more important than others.”

“Some are more interesting in the sense that they add to the problems of a painter.  When he has to paint a human being, he has to represent truth of action, the particular character of an individual; but he must do the latter when he paints a pear.  No two pears are alike.”

I fear at the time I hardly understood the importance of the lesson which I then received; certainly not to the degree with which experience has confirmed it.  But I have written it here, the sense, if not the actual language, because Millet has been so often misrepresented as seeking to point a moral through the subject of his pictures.  When we recall the manner in which “The Angelus” was paraded through the country a few years ago, and the genuine sentiment of the simple scene—­where Millet had endeavored to express “the things that lie flat, like a plain; and the things that stand up,” like his peasants—­was travestied by gushing sentimentalists, it is pleasant to think of the wholesome common sense of the great painter.