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Coysevox is chiefly Puget exaggerated, and his pupil, Coustou, who comes down to nearly the middle of the eighteenth century, contributed nothing to French sculptural tradition. But Clodion is a distinct break. He is as different from Coysevox and Coustou as Watteau is from Lebrun. He is the essence of what we mean by Louis Quinze. His work is clever beyond characterization.

The unity of organization, the brilliancy of style, the imposing majesty which the king's taste had everywhere stamped about him upon art as well as upon literature, were by this time beginning to decay simultaneously with the old age of Louis XIV., with the reverses of his arms, and the increasing gloominess of his court; the artists who had illustrated his reign were dying one after another, as well as the orators and the poets; the sculptor James Sarazin had been gone some time; Puget and the Anguiers were dead, as well as Mansard, Perrault, and Le Notre; Girardon had but a few months to live; only Coysevox was destined to survive the king, whose statue he had many a time moulded.

We fare again westward along the gardens and emerge into the Place de la Concorde by the gate adorned with Coysevox' statues, Fame and Mercury on Winged Horses, facing, on the opposite side of the vast area, Guillaume Coustou's Horse Tamers from Marly.

In the centre stands a bronze statue of Louis XIV as a Roman conqueror, by Coysevox, which once stood on the Place de Grève before the old Hôtel de Ville.

Further along, on the same wall, are 784, portrait of his mother in two aspects painted for the sculptor Coysevox; and his last work, 780, Presentation at the Temple. Rigaud was especially successful with the rich bourgeoisie of Paris, and later became court painter, supreme in expressing the grandiose and inflated pomposities of the age.

There, too, was Le Brun, the painter, discussing art in a small circle which contained his fellow-workers Verrio and Laguerre, the architects Blondel and Le Notre, and sculptors Girardon, Puget, Desjardins, and Coysevox, whose works had done so much to beautify the new palace of the king.

Our old-time sculptors Clodion and Coysevox were not profound; nor were Fragonard, La Tour, nor Marivaux, yet they brought honor to the French school. All have their value and all are necessary. The rose with its fresh color and its perfume, is, in its way, as precious as the sturdy oak.

La Venus Anadyomene Est en pelisse a capuchon: Flore, que la brise malmene, Plonge ses mains dans son manchon. Et pour la saison, les bergeres De Coysevox et de Coustou, Trouvant leures echarpes legeres Ont des boas autour du cou. Of course, poetic pictures can be painted Gautier has painted them but the standard for each art is set by what it can do uniquely well.

The family of Marigny, to whom the estates of this Cottin were brought in marriage by Mademoiselle Cottin, her father's sole heiress, ordered a sunrise to be carved on this pediment by Coysevox. Beneath it are two angels unwinding a scroll, on which is cut this motto in honor of the Grand Monarch, "Sol nobis benignus."