When, after a two months’ sojourn in the Pyrenees, you leave Luchon, and see the flat country near Martres, you are delighted and breathe freely: you were tired, without knowing it, of those eternal barriers that shut in the horizon; you needed space. You felt that the air and light were usurped by those monstrous protuberances, and that you were not in a land of men, but in a land of mountains. Unknown to yourself you longed for a real champaign, free and broad. That of Martres is as level as a sheet of water, populous, fertile, stocked with good plants, well cultivated, convenient for life, a realm of abundance and security. There is no doubt that a field of brown earth, broadly ploughed with deep furrows, is a noble sight, and that the labor and happiness of civilized man are as pleasant to behold as the ruggedness of the untamed rocks.

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A highway white and flat led in a straight line to the very horizon, and ended in a cluster of red houses; the peaked belfry lifted its needle into the sky; but for the sun, it would pass for a Flemish landscape.

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In the streets there were Van Ostade’s interiors. Old houses, roofs of uneven thatch, leaning one upon another, machines for hemp displayed in the doorways, little courtyards filled with tubs, wheelbarrows, straw, children, animals—a gay and well-to-do air; above all the great illuminator of the country, the universal decorator, the everlasting giver of joy, the sun poured in profusion its beautiful warm light over the walls of ruddy brick, and patched with strong shadows the white roughcast.

II.

Toulouse appears, all red with bricks, amidst the red dust of evening.

A melancholy city, with narrow and flinty streets. The town hall, called Capicole, has but one narrow entrance, commonplace halls, a pronounced and elegant faÇade in the taste of the decorations for public festivals. In order that no one may doubt its antiquity, they have inscribed on it the word Capitolium. The cathedral, dedicated to St. Stephen, is remarkable only for one pleasant memory:

“Towards the year 1027,” says Pierre de Marca,

“It was the custom at Toulouse to box a Jew’s ears in public on Easter day, in the Church of St. Stephen. Hugues, chaplain to Aimery, Viscount de Rochechouart, being at Toulouse in his master’s suite, dealt the Jew a blow with such force that it crushed his head and made his brains and eyes to fall out, as AdhÉmar has observed in his chronicle.”

The choir where AdhÉmar made this observation is wanting in neither beauty nor grandeur; but what strikes you most on leaving the mountains, is the museum. You find anew thought, passion, genius, art, all the most beautiful flowers of human civilization.

It is a broad, well-lighted hall, flanked by two small galleries of greater height, which form a semicircle, and filled with pictures of all the schools, some of which are excellent. A Murillo, representing St. Diego and his Monks; you recognize in it the monastic harshness, the master’s sentiment of reality, his originality of expression and earnest vigor. A Martyrdom of St. Andrew, by Caravaggio, black and horrible. Several pictures by the Caracci, Guercino and Guido. A Ceremony of the Order of the Holy Ghost in 1635, by Philip de Champagne. These most real, delicate and noble faces are portraits of the time; you see the contemporaries of Louis XIII. in life. Here are the correct drawing, temperate color, conscientious but not literal exactness of a Fleming become a Frenchman.

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A charming Marquise dc Largillere with a wasp waist in blue velvet, elegant and haughty. A Christ Crucified, by Rubens, the eyes glassy, flesh livid—a powerful sketch, wherein the cold whiteness of the faded tints exhales the frightful poetry of death.

I name only the most striking; but the liveliest sensation comes from the modern pictures. They transport the mind all at once to Paris, into the midst of our discussions, into the inventive and troubled world of the modern arts, the immense laboratory where so many fruitful and opposing forces weave the work of a renewing century: A celebrated picture by Glaize, the Death of St. John the Baptist; the half-naked butcher who holds the head is a superb brute, a careless instrument of death which has just done its work well. An elegant and affected painting by Schoppin, Jacob before Laban and his two Daughters. The daughters of Laban are pretty drawing-room misses who have just disguised themselves as Arabs. Muley Abd-el-Rhaman, by Eugene Delacroix. He is motionless on a bluish and melancholy horse. Files of soldiers are presenting arms, packed in masses in a stifling atmosphere; dull heads, stupid and real, hooded with the white bournous; ruined towers are piled behind them under a leaden sun. The crude colors, the heavy garments, bronzed limbs, massive parasols, that lifeless and animal expression are the revelation of a land where thought sleeps overwhelmed and buried under the weight of barbarism, of the religion and the climate. In a corner of the small gallery is the first brilliant stroke of Couture, The Thirst of Gold. All misery and every temptation come to solicit the miser: a mother and her starving child, an artist reduced to beggary, two half-nude courtesans. He gazes at them with sorrowful ardor, but the hooked fingers cannot let go the gold. His lips shrivel, his cheeks glow, his burning eyes are fastened to their wanton bosoms. It is the torture of the heart torn by the rebellion of the senses, the concentrated despair of repressed desire, the bitter tyranny of the ruling passion. Never did face better express the soul. The drawing is bold, the color superb, more daring than in the Romans of the Decadence, so lively that you forget to notice a few crude tones, hazarded in the transport of composition.

It is perhaps too much praise. All these moderns are poets who have determined to be painters. One has sought out dramas in history, another scenes of manners; one translates religions, another a philosophy. Such an one imitates Raphael, such another the early Italian masters; the landscapist employs trees and clouds to compose odes or elegies. No one is simply a painter; they are all archaeologists, psychologists, giving setting to some memory or theory. They please our learning, our philosophy. Like ourselves, they are full and overflowing with general ideas, Parisians uneasy and curious. They live too much by the brain, and too little by the senses; they have too much wit and too little artlessness. They do not love a form for its own sake, but for what it expresses; and if they chance to love it, it is voluntarily, with an acquired taste, from an antiquary’s superstition.

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They are children of a wise generation, harassed and thoughtful, in which men who have won equality and the freedom of thought, and of shaping each for himself his religion, rank, and fortune, wish to find in art the expression of their anxieties and meditations. They are a thousand leagues away from the first masters, workmen or cavaliers, who lived out-of-doors, scarcely read at all, and thought only of giving a feast for their eyes. It is for that that I love them; I feel like them because I am of their century. Sympathy is the best source of admiration and pleasure.

III.

Below the museum is a square tower enclosed by a gallery of slender columns, which towards the top bend and are cut into trefoils, forming a border of arcades. They have gathered under this gallery all the antiquities of the country: fragments of Roman statues, severe busts of emperors, ascetic virgins of the middle ages, bas-reliefs from churches and temples, knights of stone lying all armed upon their tombs. The court was deserted and silent; tall slender trees, tufted shrubbery, were bright with the loveliest green. A dazzling sunlight fell on the red tiles of the gallery; an old fountain, loaded with little columns and heads of animals, murmured near to a bench of rose-veined marble. A statue of a young man was seen amidst the branches; stems of green hops climbed up around broken columns.

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This mixture of rustic objects and objects of art, these wrecks of two dead civilizations and the youth of flowery plants, the joyous rays on the old tiles, united in their contrasts all that I had seen for two months.

THE END.