His most important paintings are buried in the chapel of the Dominican school at Oullins, in a remote corner of the suburbs of Lyons.  Among the ten subjects that decorate the nave, we find Moses Striking the Rock, the Disciples at Emmaus, the Healing of One Possessed, of One Born Blind, and of Tobit; but in spite of the calm energy shown in these frescoes, they are disappointing by reason of their general heaviness and of the sleepy and unwonted effect of colour.  Not till we reach the choir, beyond the communion railing, do we find works of a quite different kind of art, above some magnificent figures of saints of the Order of Friars Preacher, amazing in the power of prayer, the essence of saintliness that they diffuse.

There, too, Durtal had found two large compositions:  one of the Virgin bestowing the Rosary on Saint Dominic, and the other of Saint Thomas Aquinas kneeling before an altar on which stands a Crucifix radiating light.  Never since the Middle Ages had monks been so understood and so painted; never had a more impetuous fount of soul been revealed under so stern a casing of features.  Borel was the painter of the Monastic Saints; his art, by nature rather torpid, soared up with them as soon as he tried to paint them.

At Versailles, again, even better perhaps than in the chapel of the Oullins seminary, the sincere and deeply religious work of Borel might be studied.  At the entrance to the chapel of the Augustine Sisters in that town, of which Borel had painted the nave and the choir, there stood a figure of an Abbess of the fourteenth century, Saint Clare of Montefalcone, in the black robes of an Augustinian Nun, against the stone walls of her cell, an open book on one side of the figure and a brass lamp on the other, somewhat behind her on a table.

In that face, bent over the Crucifix she was pressing to her lips, in that countenance, at once sweet and hungering, in the movement of the arms closely folded over her bosom, raised to her face, and themselves forming a cross, he had seen the complete absorption of a bride, the rapt, ecstatic joy of the purest love, and at the same time something of the anxious affection of a mother cherishing the Christ she kissed, and seemed to shelter in her bosom like a suffering child.

And this was all set forth without any theatrical attitude or forced gestures, with perfect simplicity.  This Saint Clare has no ravings, no outcries, like Saint Magdalen of Pazzi; she does not soar with the flight of divine intoxication.  The mystic possession manifests itself in a mute rapture; her transports are controlled, and her inebriety is grave; she does not diffuse herself, but opens her soul, and Jesus, as He enters in, stamps her with His likeness, impresses her with the image of the Crucifix she holds, and of which the impress was found graven on her heart when it was examined after her death.

This was the most remarkable religious painting of our time, and it was achieved with no borrowing from the Early painters, no trickery of awkward attitudes supported by iron bars, no affectations, no artifice.  And what a devout Catholic, what an emotionally pious artist must the man be who could produce such a work!