candelabra smoking with incense and ornamented with goats’ heads, a superb bronze which must have been taken from the lava of Herculaneum.  A young priest has thrown himself on his knees against this candelabra and embraces its pedestal; in terror he has allowed his censer to fall to the earth.  Standing by his side is Coresus, the high priest, crowned with ivy, enveloped in draperies, and seemingly floating in the sacerdotal whiteness of his vestments; a beardless priest, of doubtful sex, of androgynous grace, an enervated Adonis, the shadow of a man.  With a backward turn of one hand he plunges the knife in his breast; with the other he has the appearance of casting his life into the heavens, whilst across his effeminate face pass the weakness of the agony and grief of violent death.  Opposite the dying high-priest is the living though fainting victim, nearly dead at the belief that she is about to die.  With her head resting on her shoulder, she has glided before the smoking altar.  Her body has lost all rigidity on her bending legs, her arms hang down at her side; her glance is distracted; she has lost all volition in the use of her limbs; and she is there, sinking motionless, her throat scarcely distending with a breath, turning white under her crown of roses, which the painter’s brush has made to pale in sympathy.  Between her body and the altar a young priest is leaning in horrified curiosity.  Another, upon one knee, perfectly terrified, with fixed gaze and parted lips, holds before the young girl the basin used to receive the blood of the victims.  In the background are visible figures of old grey-bearded priests, aghast at the horrible spectacle.  Above them the smoke of the temple, the flames, the perfumes, and the incense of the altar mingle with the cloudy sky, a sky of a night of miracles and hell, wild and rolling, a sky of fiery and sombre whirlwind, in which a genie brandishing a torch and dagger bears Love away in sombre flight enveloped in a black mantle.  From that shadow, let us go to the shadow at the base of the picture:  two women, writhing with fear, shrink back veiling their faces; a little boy clings about their knees and holds fast to them, and a ray of sunlight, falling across the arm of one of the women, illumines the hair and the little rosy hands of the child.

Such is Fragonard’s great composition, that striking unexpected production, for which he must have taken the idea, and, perhaps, even the effect from one of the revivals of Callirhoe by the poet Roy;[27] a painting of the opera, and demanding from the opera its soul and its light.  But what a magnificent illusion this picture presents!  It must be seen in the Louvre so that the eyes may feast upon the clear and warm splendour of the canvas, the milky radiance of all those white priestly robes, the virginal light inundating the centre of the scene, palpitating and dying away on Callirhoe, enveloping her fainting body like the fading of day, and caressing