he Madeleine fund," said Dupont, who was always planning
great things for the girl's future.

"That goes to me," said the dealer, as he resold the picture and
pocketed a profit of fifteen hundred francs.

The "Daughter of Jairus" could not fail to attract much attention.
Original as it was in its composition, and independent in its conception
of a religious subject, it led to much heated controversy in the leading
papers of the day. In some of them the artist was lauded to the skies;
in others, roundly abused. Those three poor dear little innocents
standing at the open door of Jairus's house, more than any other
incident in the picture, gave rise to brilliant argument, vigorously
attacked as they were on the one hand, and heroically defended on the
other.

Virtually the able art-critics were divided into two camps, from which
they issued grandiloquent manifestoes, and passed judgment on art and
artists, past, present, and future. I have not preserved cuttings from
the papers, but I think I can give a pretty correct idea of the opposite
views taken by those heaven-born wiseacres, the art-critics of the day,
only apologising to them for my poor rendering of their doctrines.

"Monsieur Claude Dupont," said one set, "is a young man of great
promise; he is a powerful draughtsman, and his gifts, if turned to
account, may prove him to be a worthy champion of that severe and chaste
school that gave us a Lesueur, an Ingres, and a Flandrin. Whilst
prognosticating so bright a future to Monsieur Dupont, we feel, however,
that we should not be doing our duty, if we did not warn him against the
perverse influence that the apostles of the so-called Realistic school
have already begun to exercise over his brush. We allude to the three
children most unseemingly intruding on the grand scene that is being
enacted in the house of sorrow. Let us hope that the danger that
threatens the young artist may yet be averted, and that so much talent
may be applied to perpetuate the traditions of a great past."

"Monsieur Claude Dupont," said the other camp, "has a great future
before him, if he wisely utilises his gifts. We welcome in him a painter
who, in his treatment of a religious subject, breaks with the traditions
of an effete school. The introduction of those three children, peering
with wondering eyes into the house of mysteries, we consider a stroke of
genius. But for all that, the fetters forged by the past are still
clinging to him.