When I enter his home, I nearly always find him sitting before a small ground-glass window in the corner of his studio, bent over some engraving.  I have leave to enter at all hours.  He is free not to stir from his work.  “Good-day,” he calls out, without raising his head, without knowing for certain who has come in, and goes on with the engraving he has in hand.  I settle down at the end of the room, on the sofa with the faded cover, and, until Lampron deigns to grant me audience, I am free to sleep, or smoke, or turn over the wonderful drawings that lean against the walls.  Among them are treasures beyond price; for Lampron is a genius whose only mistake is to live and act with modesty, so that as yet people only say that he has “immense talent.”  No painter or engraver of repute—­and he is both—­has served a more conscientious apprenticeship, or sets greater store on thoroughness in his art.  His drawing is correct beyond reproach—­a little stiff, like the early painters.  You can guess from his works his partiality for the old masters—­Perugino, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Memling, Holbein—­who, though not the masters in fashion, will always be masters in vigor of outline, directness, in simple grace, and genuine feeling.  He has copied in oils, water-colors, pen, or pencil, nearly all the pictures of these masters in the Louvre, in Germany, in Holland, and especially in Italy, where he lived for many years.  With tastes such as his came the habit, or rather the fixed determination, never to paint or engrave any but sacred subjects.  Puffs and cliques are his abomination.  His ideal is the archaic rendered by modern methods.  An artist of this type can but obtain the half-grudging esteem of his own profession, and of the few critics who really understand something about art.  Gladly, and with absolute disdain, he leaves to others the applause of the mob, the gilded patronage of American purchasers, and the right to wear lace cuffs.  In short, in an age when the artist is often half a manufacturer and half a charlatan, he is an artist only.

Now and then he is rich, but never for long.  Half of his earnings goes in alms; half into the pockets of his mendicant brethren.  They hear the gold jingle before it is counted, and run with outstretched palms.  Each is in the depths of misfortune; on the eve of ascending the fatal slope; lost, unless the helpful hand of Lampron will provide, saved if he will lend wherewithal to buy a block of marble, to pay a model, to dine that evening.  He lends—­I should say gives; the words mean the same in many societies.  Of all that he has gained, fame alone remains, and even this he tries to do without—­modest, retiring, shunning all entertainments.  I believe he would often be without the wherewithal to live were it not for his mother, whom he supports, and who does him the kindness to need something to live on.  Madame Lampron does not hoard; she only fills the place of those dams of cut turf which the peasants build in the channels of the Berry in spring; the water passes over them, beneath them, even through them, but still a little is left for the great droughts.