of income remaining to him, he gave up to his mother
twelve thousand five hundred. It is expedient to add that in less than
a year afterward he married the sister of his college friend and four
hundred thousand dollars. He had seen poverty and he was afraid of it.
His action with regard to his mother seemed to justify in his own eyes
the purely interested character of the combination which freed his brush
forever. There are, moreover, such artistic consciences. Maitland would
not have pardoned himself a concession of art. He considered rascals the
painters who begged success by compromise in their style, and he thought
it quite natural to take the money of Mademoiselle Chapron, whom he
did not love, and for whom, now that he had grown to manhood and knew
several of her compatriots, he likewise felt the prejudice of race.
"The glory of the colonel of the Empire and friendship for that good
Florent," as he said, "covered all."

Poor and good Florent! That marriage was to him the romance of his youth
realized. He had desired it since the first week that Maitland had given
him the cordial handshake which had bound them. To live in the shadow of
his friend, become at once his brother-in-law and his ideal--he did not
dream of any other solution of his own destiny. The faults of Maitland,
developed by age, fortune, and success--we recall the triumph of his
'Femme en violet et en jeune' in the Salon of 1884--found Florent as
blind as at the epoch when they played cricket together in the fields at
Beaumont. Dorsenne very justly diagnosed there one of those hypnotisms
of admiration such as artists, great or small, often inspire around
them. But the author, who always generalized too quickly, had not
comprehended that the admirer with Florent was grafted on a friend
worthy to be painted by La Fontaine or by Balzac, the two poets of
friendship, the one in his sublime and tragic Cousin Pons, the other
in that short but fine fable, in which is this verse, one of the most
tender in the French language:

Vous metes, en dormant, un peu triste apparu.

Florent did not love Lincoln because he admired him; he admired him
because he loved him. He was not wrong in considering the painter as one
of the most gifted who had appeared for thirty years. But Lincoln
would have had neither the bold elegance of his drawing, nor the vivid
strength of coloring, nor the ingenious finesse of imagination if the
other had lent himself with less ardo