icient for the purpose. But that he no
longer needs.

With myself, how to get through time becomes sometimes the
question,--unavoidably; though it strikes me as a thing unspeakably sad
in a life so short as ours. The sullenness of a long wet day is
yielding just now to an outburst of watery sunset, which strikes from
the far horizon of this quiet world of ours, over fields and
willow-woods, upon the shifty weather-vanes and long-pointed windows of
the tower on the square--from which the Angelus is sounding-with a
momentary promise of a fine night. I prefer the Salut at Saint Vaast.
The walk thither is a longer one, and I have a fancy always that I may
meet Antony Watteau there again, any time; just as, when a child,
having found one day a tiny box in the shape of a silver coin, for long
afterwards I used to try every piece of money that came into my hands,
expecting it to open.

September 1714.

We were sitting in the Watteau chamber for the coolness, this sultry
evening. A sudden gust of wind ruffled the lights in the sconces on the
walls: the distant rumblings, which had continued all the afternoon,
broke out at last; and through the driving rain, a coach, rattling
across the Place, stops at our door: in a moment Jean-Baptiste is with
us once again; but with bitter tears in his eyes;--dismissed!

October 1714.

Jean-Baptiste! he too, rejected by Antony! It makes our friendship and
fraternal sympathy closer. And still as he labours, not less sedulously
than of old, and still so full of loyalty to his old master, in that
Watteau chamber, I seem to see Antony himself, of whom Jean-Baptiste
dares not yet speak,--to come very near his work, and understand his
great parts. So Jean-Baptiste's work, in its nearness to his, may
stand, for the future, as the central interest of my life. I bury
myself in that.

February 1715.

If I understand anything of these matters, Antony Watteau paints that
delicate life of Paris so excellently, with so much spirit, partly
because, after all, he looks down upon it or despises it. To persuade
myself of that, is my womanly satisfaction for his preference--his
apparent preference--for a world so different from mine. Those
coquetries, those vain and perishable graces, can be rendered so
perfectly, only through an intimate understanding of them. For him, to
understand must be to despise them; while (I think I know why) he
nevertheless undergoes their fascination. Hence that disc