disciple what remains of himself, and the last secrets of
his genius.

His property--9000 livres only--goes to his relations. Jean-Baptiste
has found these last weeks immeasurably useful.

For the rest, bodily exhaustion perhaps, and this new interest in an
old friend, have brought him tranquillity at last, a tranquillity in
which he is much occupied with matters of religion. Ah! it was ever so
with me. And one lives also most reasonably so. With women, at least,
it is thus, quite certainly. Yet I know not what there is of a pity
which strikes deep, at the thought of a man, a while since so strong,
turning his face to the wall from the things which most occupy men's
lives. 'Tis that homely, but honest cure of Nogent he has caricatured
so often, who attends him.

July 1721.

Our incomparable Watteau is no more! Jean-Baptiste returned
unexpectedly. I heard his hasty footstep on the stairs. We turned
together into that room; and he told his story there. Antony Watteau
departed suddenly, in the arms of M. Gersaint, on one of the late hot
days of July. At the last moment he had been at work upon a crucifix
for the good cure of Nogent, liking little the very rude one he [44]
possessed. He died with all the sentiments of religion.

He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after
something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not
at all.

NOTES

37. *Possibly written at this date, but almost certainly not printed
till many years later.--Note in Second Edition. Return.

II. DENYS L'AUXERROIS

[47] Almost every people, as we know, has had its legend of a "golden
age" and of its return--legends which will hardly be forgotten, however
prosaic the world may become, while man himself remains the aspiring,
never quite contented being he is. And yet in truth, since we are no
longer children, we might well question the advantage of the return to
us of a condition of life in which, by the nature of the case, the
values of things would, so to speak, lie wholly on their surfaces,
unless we could regain also the childish consciousness, or rather
unconsciousness, in ourselves, to take all that adroitly and with the
appropriate lightness of heart. The dream, however, has been left for
the most part in the usual vagueness of dreams: in their waking hours
people have been too busy to furnish it forth with details. What
follows is a quaint legend, with detail enough, of