es, Madeleine,--yes."

* * * * *

And now that I have said what I wanted to say about those friends of my
early days, and followed them to the closing chapters of their lives, I
ought perhaps at once to turn over a new leaf and record a fresh
impression. But it is hard to dismiss memories which one has evoked. Why
should one? Nothing in good old Nature is abrupt; the sun sets and day
fades into night; in the rainbow yellow merges into green, and green
into blue, and it seems but in keeping with the ways of Nature that
there should be something to read between the lines of a slightly
sketched life-story, and something to be thought out between
heterogeneous chapters. They cannot but be varying if they are to depict
the motley crowd of figures that go to make up one's own experiences.
Such chapters are like the various pieces on the programme of a musical
recital. There we are taken from a fugue to a notturno, from a grande
valse to a moonshine sonata; and the pianist, if by some chance he
happens to be a musician, leads us with a few improvised chords, from
one mood to another, from flats to sharps, major to minor.

So then my starting-point is once more Dupont, and before I think of
other friends, I find myself speculating as to what he might have
achieved, and to what honours he might have attained, had he lived. What
would he have thought of to-day, and what would to-day have thought of
him? To be sure he would be wearing a bit of red ribbon in his
button-hole, as all distinguished Frenchmen do; and who is not
distinguished? By this time he would have been an Academician, royal or
national, a Membre de l'Institut, perhaps even one of the forty
"Immortals," if he had taken to the pen, as we know painters will
sometimes do. In the eyes of the rising generation the Immortals mostly
take rank with any other old fogeys, and Dupont would have fared no
better than his contemporaries at the hands of the _Nous avons change
tout cela's_ of the day.

It could not have been otherwise; for, alas! (and I have not sought to
disguise it) he had none of their distinctive qualities. He never loved
the un-beautiful for its own sake, nor was he a man of the
prominent-wart school. In his compositions elevated thought and subtle
expression had a fatal tendency to eclipse the non-essentials; his
luminary rays were painted without regard for the laws of decomposition,
and his atmospheric vibrations, if he a