robe--she with whom the Prodigal's right
hand toys in caress--makes up a wonderfully brilliant prismatic
chord, having the effect of focusing the richer, but not less
gorgeous, pigments spread everywhere on the canvas. The faces of
the women are very beautiful, and are made voluptuous by a
subtle art which, through all their beauty, tells a story of
unrestrained lives of passion and pleasure.

The face of the magnificent creature at the Prodigal's left hand
is a wondrous piece of drawing. It is thrown back against him
and from the spectator, in order that she may look up into his
face--at the moment a dissipated, spiritless face, without even
the flush of the wine which dyes her's so rosily--a face at once
weak and weary, and yet revealing a possible intensity, indeed,
the face of a French woman who "has lived," rather than that of a
man.

Up to this centre leads the other groups. Below, and seated on
the rich rugs which cover the marble pavement, musicians
and singers pause to listen to impassioned words from a
laurel-crowned poet, while further on a sort of orchestra
plays time for the sensuous dance of lithe-bodied Oriental
dancers--each woman of them more ravishing than the other. Minor
incidents, like dice-play and love-making, give interest to the
remaining space, and keep up the revel.

Throughout, the drawing is true, and good, and graceful. The
hands of the figures demand especial mention. The hand of one of
the women, near the central group, grasped by her lover at the
wrist as he kisses her shoulder, is particularly exquisite
in form and color; the more remarkable, perhaps, because the
position of it is so trying in nature and so difficult to draw.

The type of feature chosen for the women, the dancing girls
excepted, is essentially Gallic. As remarked before, the face
of the Prodigal, also, is French; but the musicians and the poet
have faces of their own which seem to belong to the university of
genius. The mere revelers, curiously enough, have a likeness to
the figures in some old Italian pictures; one of them looks like
a copy of Judas Iscariot, made younger.

A distant city and mountains fill up the background, and, on
the extreme right of the near middle distance, flights of
marble steps ascend to a grand doorway, where servants are seen
loitering within easy call of their masters.

It was by a sublime inspiration that Dubufe painted the accessory
panels in monotone. In that on the right, a di