f God and refusing all
remuneration from priests or monks. Durtal knew his pictures, and they
had suggested much the same reflections as those aroused by the
Benedictine paintings of Beuron.

At first sight Paul Borel's work is neither cheerful nor attractive; the
phrases he used might often have made a partisan of the modern smile;
and besides, to judge his work fairly it is indispensable to get rid of
part of it, to refuse to see anything but that which has evaded the
too-familiar formulas of commonplace unction; and then what a spirit of
manly fervency, of ardent piety, filled and upheld it.

His most important paintings are buried in the chapel of the Dominican
school at Oullins, in a remote corner of the suburbs of Lyons. Among the
ten subjects that decorate the nave, we find Moses Striking the Rock,
the Disciples at Emmaus, the Healing of One Possessed, of One Born
Blind, and of Tobit; but in spite of the calm energy shown in these
frescoes, they are disappointing by reason of their general heaviness
and of the sleepy and unwonted effect of colour. Not till we reach the
choir, beyond the communion railing, do we find works of a quite
different kind of art, above some magnificent figures of saints of the
Order of Friars Preacher, amazing in the power of prayer, the essence of
saintliness that they diffuse.

There, too, Durtal had found two large compositions: one of the Virgin
bestowing the Rosary on Saint Dominic, and the other of Saint Thomas
Aquinas kneeling before an altar on which stands a Crucifix radiating
light. Never since the Middle Ages had monks been so understood and so
painted; never had a more impetuous fount of soul been revealed under so
stern a casing of features. Borel was the painter of the Monastic
Saints; his art, by nature rather torpid, soared up with them as soon as
he tried to paint them.

At Versailles, again, even better perhaps than in the chapel of the
Oullins seminary, the sincere and deeply religious work of Borel might
be studied. At the entrance to the chapel of the Augustine Sisters in
that town, of which Borel had painted the nave and the choir, there
stood a figure of an Abbess of the fourteenth century, Saint Clare of
Montefalcone, in the black robes of an Augustinian Nun, against the
stone walls of her cell, an open book on one side of the figure and a
brass lamp on the other, somewhat behind her on a table.

In that face, bent over the Crucifix she was pressing to her li