his work.  Studies of coachmen, smokers, readers, soldiers, housemaids, chess-players, cavaliers and serenaders were not enough upon which to base an art reputation—­the man must show that he had moved men to high endeavor, said the detractors.  A fund was started to purchase the Mackay portrait, so as to do the very thing that Meissonier had threatened to do, but dare not:  place the picture on exhibition.  To show the picture, the enemy said, would be to prove the artist’s commonplace quality, and not only this, but it would prove the man a rogue.  They declared he was incapable of perceiving the good qualities in a sitter, and had consented for a price to portray a person whom he disliked; and as a result, of course, had produced a caricature; and then had blackmailed his patron into paying an outrageous sum to keep the picture from the public.

The argument sounded plausible.  And so the battle raged, just as it has since in reference to Zola.

The tide of Meissonier’s prosperity began to ebb:  prospective buyers kept away; those who had given commissions canceled them.

Meissonier’s friends saw that something must be done.  They inaugurated a “Meissonier Vindication,” by making an exhibition of one hundred fifty-five “Meissoniers”—­and the public was invited to come and be the jury.  Art-lovers from England went in bodies, and all Paris filed through the gallery, as well as a goodly portion of provincial France.  By the side of each canvas stood a gendarme to protect it from a possible fanatic whose artistic hate could not be restrained.

To a great degree this exhibition brought feeling to a normal condition.  Meissonier was still a great artist, yet he was human and his effects were now believed to be gotten by natural methods.  But there was a lull in the mad rush to secure his wares.  The Vanderbilts grew lukewarm; titled connoisseurs from England were not so anxious; and Mrs. Mackay sat back and smiled through her tears.

Meissonier had expended over a million francs on his house in the Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, and nearly as much on the country-seat at Poissy.  These places were kingly in their appointments and such as only the State should attempt to maintain.  For a single man, by the work of his right hand, to keep them up was too much to expect.

Meissonier’s success had been too great.  As a collector he had overdone the thing.  Only poor men, or those of moderate incomes, should be collectors, for then the joy of sacrifice is theirs.  Charles Lamb’s covetous looking on the book when it was red, daily for months, meanwhile hoarding his pay, and at last one Saturday night swooping down and carrying the volume home to Bridget in triumph, is the true type.

But money had come to Meissonier by hundreds of thousands of francs, and often sums were forced upon him as advance payments.  He lived royally and never imagined that his hand and brain could lose their cunning, or the public be fickle.