of making up to myself for the
fact that I think his days, too, would have been really happier, had he
remained obscure at Valenciennes.

September 1717.

My own poor likeness, begun so long ago, still remains unfinished on
the easel, at his departure from Valenciennes--perhaps for ever; since
the old people departed this life in the hard winter of last year, at
no distant time from each other. It is pleasanter to him to sketch and
plan than to paint and finish; and he is often out of humour with
himself because he cannot project into a picture the life and spirit of
his first thought with the crayon. He would fain begin where that
famous master Gerard Dow left off, and snatch, as it were with a single
stroke, what in him was the result of infinite patience. It is the
sign of this sort of promptitude that he values solely in work of
another. To my thinking there is a [36] kind of greed or grasping in
that humour; as if things were not to last very long, and one must
snatch opportunity. And often he succeeds. The old Dutch painter
cherished with a kind of piety his colours and pencils. Antony
Watteau, on the contrary, will hardly make any preparations for his
work at all, or even clean his palette, in the dead-set he makes at
improvisation. 'Tis the contrast perhaps between the staid Dutch
genius and the petulant, sparkling French temper of this new era, into
which he has thrown himself. Alas! it is already apparent that the
result also loses something of longevity, of durability--the colours
fading or changing, from the first, somewhat rapidly, as Jean-Baptiste
notes. 'Tis true, a mere trifle alters or produces the expression.
But then, on the other hand, in pictures the whole effect of which lies
in a kind of harmony, the treachery of a single colour must needs
involve the failure of the whole to outlast the fleeting grace of those
social conjunctions it is meant to perpetuate. This is what has
happened, in part, to that portrait on the easel. Meantime, he has
commanded Jean-Baptiste to finish it; and so it must be.

October 1717.

Anthony Watteau is an excellent judge of literature, and I have been
reading (with infinite [37] surprise!) in my afternoon walks in the
little wood here, a new book he left behind him--a great favourite of
his; as it has been a favourite with large numbers in Paris.* Those
pathetic shocks of fortune, those sudden alternations of pleasure and
remorse, which must always lie