long while held
out; the king insisted. "I shall go," said Le Poussin, "like one
sentenced to be sawn in halves and severed in twain." He passed eighteen
months in France, welcomed enthusiastically, lodged at the Tuileries,
magnificently paid, but exposed to the jealousies of Simon Vouet and his
pupils. Worried, thwarted, frozen to death by the hoarfrosts of Paris,
he took the road back to Rome in November, 1642, on the pretext of going
to fetch his wife, and did not return any more. He had left in France
some of his masterpieces, models of that, new, independent, and
conscientious art, faithfully studied from nature in all its Italian
grandeur, and from the treasures of the antique. "How did you arrive at
such perfection?" people would ask Le Poussin. "By neglecting nothing,"
the painter would reply. In the same way Newton was soon to discover the
great laws of the physical world, by always thinking thereon."

[Illustration: Le Poussin and Claude Lorrain----675]

During Le Poussin's stay at Paris he had taken as a pupil Eustache
Lesueur, who had been trained in the studio of Simon Vouet, but had been
struck from the first with the incomparable genius and proud independence
of the master sent to him by fate. Alone he had supported Le Poussin in
his struggle against the envious; alone he entered upon the road which
revealed itself to him whilst he studied under Le Poussin. He was poor;
he had great difficulty in managing to live. The delicacy, the purity,
the suavity of his genius could shine forth in their entirety nowhere but
in the convent of the Carthusians, whose cloister he was commissioned to
decorate. There he painted the life of St. Bruno, breathing into this
almost mystical work all the religious poetry of his soul and of his
talent, ever delicate and chaste even in the allegorical figures of
mythology with which he before long adorned the Hotel Lambert. He had
returned to his favorite pursuits, embellishing the churches of Paris
with incomparable works, when, overwhelmed by the loss of his wife, and
exhausted by the painful efforts of his genius, he died at thirty-seven,
in that convent of the Carthusians which he glorified with his talent, at
the same time that he edified the monks with his religious zeal. Lesueur
succumbed in a struggle too rude and too rough for his pure and delicate
nature. Lebrun had returned from that Italy which Lesueur had never been
able to reach; the old rivalry, foster