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"When I come to look for No. 7," continued Fraisier, "I find a portrait of a lady, signed 'Chardin, without a number on it!
He received from the king a pension of five hundred francs, his son obtained the prix de Rome for a meritorious canvas, and if he had had his father's stable temperament he would have ended an admirable artist. But he was reckless, and died at Venice in a mysterious manner, drowned in a canal, whether by murder or suicide no one knew. Chardin never recovered his spirits after this shock.
He might have added the silvery grays. M. Pilon remarks that as in the case of Vermeer the secret of Chardin tones has never been surprised. The French painter knew the art of modulation, while his transitions are bold; he enveloped his objects in atmosphere and gave his shadows a due share of luminosity. He placed his colours so that at times his work resembles mosaic or tapestry.
The main saloon of the Gaston de Paris fought in all its details against the idea of shipboard life, the gilt and scrolls of the yacht decorator, the mirrors, and all the rest of his abominations were not to be found here, panels by Chardin painted for Madame de Pompadour occupied the walls, the main lamp, a flying dragon by Benvenuto Cellini, clutching in its claws a globe of fire, had, for satellites, four torch bearers of bronze by Claus, a library, writing and smoking room, combined, opened from the main saloon, and there was a boudoir decorated in purple and pearl with flower pictures by Lactropius unfaded despite their date of 1685.
Their taste that curious taste, so distinctly characterized, so different from our own, is displayed in the construction of gigantic edifices, quite as much as in jewellery and goldsmith's work, and in the manufacture of those costly trifles of which the east was beginning to be passionately fond. Like a wise man, Chardin takes a partner, as good a connoisseur as himself.
Sometimes, through an open window on the ground-floor, I caught sight of an interior, picturesque and familiar: here a jolly-looking laundress holding her flat-iron to her cheek; there workmen sitting at tables and smoking in the basement of a cabaret, while an old Bohemian with long gray hair, standing before them, sang something about "Liberty," accompanying himself on a guitar about the color of bouillon the scenes of Chardin and Van Ostade.
Pietro della Valle, Henry Lord, Mandelslo, Ovington, Chardin, Gabriel du Chinon, and Tavernier, found Zoroaster's last followers in Persia and India, and made known their existence, their manners, and the main features of their belief to Europe.
"You are a man of honor, and I accept." This is how it came to pass that Clement Chardin des Lupeaulx, whose father was ennobled under Louis XV., and who beareth quarterly, first, argent, a wolf ravisant carrying a lamb gules; second, purpure, three mascles argent, two and one; third, paly of twelve, gules and argent; fourth, or, on a pale endorsed, three batons fleurdelises gules; supported by four griffon's-claws jessant from the sides of the escutcheon, with the motto "En Lupus in Historia," was able to surmount these rather satirical arms with a count's coronet.
Chardin is a painter who seems to me, at least, to stand quite apart, quite alone, in the development of French painting, whereas there could not be a more marked instance of the inherence of the classic spirit in the French æsthetic nature than is furnished by Greuze.
The Baroness, all feeling and all hope, related her visit to Josepha, expressed her sense of the misery of such women in the midst of good fortune, and mentioned Chardin the mattress-picker, the father of the Oran storekeeper, thus showing that her hopes were not groundless.
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