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A French officer, Jean-Baptiste Dubois, commander of the artillery, advanced, sword in hand, to the front, and in the presence of Tracy and Courcelle, declared that he was directed by M. Jean Talon, king's counsellor and intendant of justice, police, and finance for New France, to take possession of Andaraque, and of all the country of the Mohawks, in the name of the king.

The charm of all this his physiognomy and manner of being has touched even my young brother, Jean-Baptiste. He is greatly taken with Antony, clings to him almost too attentively, and will be nothing but a painter, though my father would have trained him to follow his own profession. It may do the child good.

I fancy Antony fled thither for a few moments, from the visitors who weary him; breathing the freshness of that dewy garden in the very midst of Paris. As for me, I suffocate this summer afternoon in this pretty Watteau chamber of ours, where Jean-Baptiste is at work so contentedly. May 1717.

Then Capitain Jean-Baptiste Grandissime for the first time spoke at length: "Do you see this?" he spoke the French of the Atchafalaya. He put his long flintlock pistol close to her face. "I shall take the trap off; you will walk three feet in front of me; if you make it four I blow your brains out; we shall go to Agricole.

But then, on the other hand, in pictures the whole effect of which lies in a kind of harmony, the treachery of a single colour must needs involve the failure of the whole to outlast the fleeting grace of those social conjunctions it is meant to perpetuate. This is what has happened, in part, to that portrait on the easel. Meantime, he has commanded Jean-Baptiste to finish it; and so it must be.

Can it be that, after all, he despises and is no true lover of his own art, and is but chilled by an enthusiasm for it in another, such as that of Jean-Baptiste? as if Jean-Baptiste over-valued it, or as if some ignobleness or blunder, some sign that he has really missed his aim, started into sight from his work at the sound of praise as if such praise could hardly be altogether sincere.

It was the chair of Pierre Sylvestre Bonnard, the cloth merchant of Epimenide Bonnard, his son of Jean-Baptiste Bonnard, the Pyrrhonian philosopher and Chief of the Third Maritime Division. Oh! what a robust and venerable chair! In reality it was a dead chair. Well, doctor, I am that chair.

I am better far beside Jean-Baptiste in contact with his quiet, even labour, and manner of being. At first he did the work to which he had set himself, sullenly; but the mechanical labour of it has cleared his mind and temper at last, as a sullen day turns quite clear and fine by imperceptible change.

He seems now anxious for one thing only, to give his old "dismissed" disciple what remains of himself and the last secrets of his genius. His property 9000 livres only goes to his relations. Jean-Baptiste has found these last weeks immeasurably useful.

My brother, Jean-Baptiste, ran to tell the news to old Jean-Philippe and Michelle Watteau. A new manner of painting! The old furniture of people's rooms must needs be changed throughout, it would seem, to accord with this painting; or rather, the painting is designed exclusively to suit one particular kind of apartment.