ruined, without resources at forty-four years of age, persuaded himself of his glorious future, he had one of those magnificent impulses such as one has in youth and which prove much less the generosity than the pride of life.  Of the fifteen thousand francs of income remaining to him, he gave up to his mother twelve thousand five hundred.  It is expedient to add that in less than a year afterward he married the sister of his college friend and four hundred thousand dollars.  He had seen poverty and he was afraid of it.  His action with regard to his mother seemed to justify in his own eyes the purely interested character of the combination which freed his brush forever.  There are, moreover, such artistic consciences.  Maitland would not have pardoned himself a concession of art.  He considered rascals the painters who begged success by compromise in their style, and he thought it quite natural to take the money of Mademoiselle Chapron, whom he did not love, and for whom, now that he had grown to manhood and knew several of her compatriots, he likewise felt the prejudice of race.  “The glory of the colonel of the Empire and friendship for that good Florent,” as he said, “covered all.”

Poor and good Florent!  That marriage was to him the romance of his youth realized.  He had desired it since the first week that Maitland had given him the cordial handshake which had bound them.  To live in the shadow of his friend, become at once his brother-in-law and his ideal—­he did not dream of any other solution of his own destiny.  The faults of Maitland, developed by age, fortune, and success—­we recall the triumph of his ‘Femme en violet et en jeune’ in the Salon of 1884—­found Florent as blind as at the epoch when they played cricket together in the fields at Beaumont.  Dorsenne very justly diagnosed there one of those hypnotisms of admiration such as artists, great or small, often inspire around them.  But the author, who always generalized too quickly, had not comprehended that the admirer with Florent was grafted on a friend worthy to be painted by La Fontaine or by Balzac, the two poets of friendship, the one in his sublime and tragic Cousin Pons, the other in that short but fine fable, in which is this verse, one of the most tender in the French language: 

     Vous metes, en dormant, un peu triste apparu.

Florent did not love Lincoln because he admired him; he admired him because he loved him.  He was not wrong in considering the painter as one of the most gifted who had appeared for thirty years.  But Lincoln would have had neither the bold elegance of his drawing, nor the vivid strength of coloring, nor the ingenious finesse of imagination if the other had lent himself with less ardor to the service of the work and to the glory of the artist.  When Lincoln wanted to travel he found his brother-in-law the most diligent of couriers.  When he had need of a model he had only to say a word for Florent to set about finding one.  Did Lincoln exhibit at Paris or