One more visit stands out prominently in my memory.  It came about in this wise.  In the summer of 1874 the “two Stevensons,” as they were known, the cousins Robert Louis and Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (the author of the recent “Life of Velasquez,” and the well-known writer on art), were in Barbizon.  It fell that the cousins, in pessimistic vein, were decrying modern art—­the great men were all dead; we should never see their like again; in short, the mood in which we all fall at times was dominant.  As in duty bound, I argued the cause of the present and future, and as a clinching argument told them that I had it in my power to convince them that at least one of the greatest painters of all time was still busy in the practice of his art.  Millet was not much more than a name to my friends, and I am certain that that day when we talked over our coffee in the garden of Siron’s inn, they had seen little or none of his work.  I ventured across the road, knocked at the little green door, and asked permission to bring my friends, which was accorded for the same afternoon.  In half an hour, therefore, I was witness of an object lesson of which the teacher was serenely unconscious.  Of my complete triumph when we left there was no doubt, though one of my friends rather begged the question by insisting that I had taken an unfair advantage; and that, as he expressed it, “it was not in the game, in an ordinary discussion, between gentlemen, concerning minor poets, to drag in Shakespeare in that manner.”

I saw Millet but once after this, when late in the autumn I was returning to Paris, and went, out of respect, to bid him farewell.  He was already ill, and those who knew him well, already feared for his life.  Not knowing this, it was a shock to learn of his death a few months after—­January 20, 1875.  The news came to me in the form of the ordinary notification and convocation to the funeral, which, in the form of a lettre de faire part, is sent out on the occasion of a death in France, not only to intimate friends, but to acquaintances.

Determined to pay what honor I could, I went to Barbizon, to find, as did many others gone for the same sad purpose, that an error in the notices sent, discovered too late to be rectified, had placed the date of the funeral a day later than that on which it actually occurred.  Millet rests in the little cemetery at Chailly, across the plain from Barbizon, near his lifetime friend, Theodore Rousseau, who is buried there.  I will never forget the January day in the village of Barbizon.  Though Millet had little part in the village life, and was known to few, a sadness, as though the very houses felt that a great man had passed away, had settled over the place.  I sought out a friend who had been Millet’s friend for many years and was with him at the last, and as he told me of the last sad months, tears fell from his eyes.

CHAPTERS FROM A LIFE.