d, in part, to that
portrait on the easel. Meantime, he has commanded Jean-Baptiste to
finish it; and so it must be.

October 1717.

Antony Watteau is an excellent judge of literature, and I have been
reading (with infinite 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 among the very conditions of an irregular and
guilty love, as in sinful games of chance:--they have begun to talk of
these things in Paris, to amuse themselves with the spectacle of them,
set forth here, in the story of poor Manon Lescaut--for whom fidelity
is impossible, vulgarly eager for the money which can buy pleasures,
such as hers--with an art like Watteau's own, for lightness and grace.
Incapacity of truth, yet with such tenderness, such a gift of tears, on
the one side: on the other, a faith so absolute as to give to an
illicit love almost the regularity of marriage! And this is the book
those fine ladies in Watteau's "conversations," who look so exquisitely
pure, lay down on the cushion when the children run up to have their
laces righted. Yet the pity of it! What floods of weeping! There is a
tone about which strikes me as going well with the grace of these
leafless birch-trees against the sky, the pale silver of their bark,
and a certain delicate odour of decay which rises from the soil. It is
all one half-light; and the heroine, nay! The hero himself also, that
dainty Chevalier des Grieux, with all his fervour, have, I think, but a
half-life in them truly, from the first. And I could fancy myself
almost of their condition sitting here alone this evening, in which a
premature touch of winter makes the world look but an inhospitable
place of entertainment for one's spirit. With so little genial warmth
to hold it there, one feels that the merest accident might detach that
flighty guest altogether. So chilled at heart things seem to me, as I
gaze on that glacial point in the motionless sky, like some mortal spot
whence death begins to creep over the body!

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

And yet, in the midst of this, by mere force of contrast, comes back to
me, very vividly, the true colour, ruddy with blossom and fruit, of the
p