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The influence of Canova and the example of Pradier and Etex were not lasting. Indeed, Greek sculpture has perished so completely that it sometimes seems to live only in its legend. With the modern French school, the academic school, it is quite supplanted by the sculpture of the Renaissance. And this is not unreasonable.
It is true that this church looked out on a square completely French a square of a fine modern disposition, flanked on one side by a classical palais de justice embellished with trees and parapets and occupied in the centre with a group of allegorical statues such as one encounters only in the cities of France, the chief of these being a colossal figure by Pradier representing Nîmes.
Theophile Gautier, whose cult was the worship of physical beauty, wrote in almost lyric prose of her seductive charm. At nineteen, after she had been cast upon the world, dowered with that terrible combination, poverty and beauty, she had lived openly with a sculptor named Pradier. This has a certain importance in the history of French art.
Five years before her meeting with Hugo, Pradier had rather brutally severed his connection with her, and she had accepted the protection of a Russian nobleman. At this time she was known by her real name Julienne Josephine Gauvin; but having gone upon the stage, she assumed the appellation by which she was thereafter known, that of Juliette Drouet.
Outside the bank, in College Green, is the celebrated statue of William III. Its location has been more than once changed, and it is now placed where the officer on guard at the bank can keep an eye upon it. This fearful object, which would make a Pradier or Chantrey shudder, is painted and gilt annually.
Between the trellis and the terrace there was to be a smooth expanse of greensward, bordered with flowers. It seemed very simple, but I hereby confess that I built and tore down the trellis three times before it pleased me! I had to make it worthy of the statue by Pradier that was given us by Sardou, and finally it was done to please me.
In the middle is a little place, with two or three cafes decorated by wide awnings, a little place of which the principal feature is a very bad bronze statue of Saint Louis by Pradier. It is almost as bad as the breakfast I had at the inn that bears the name of that pious monarch.
The guests took their seats round a table on which was the famous centrepiece, executed after Chenavard's design, by Barye, Pradier, Klagman, Moine, my sister Marie, and by Ary Scheffer and Paul Delaroche as well, who laid aside their painters' brushes for the nonce, and wielded the sculptor's point.
Pradier had received a commission to execute a statue representing Strasburg the statue which stands to-day in the Place de la Concorde, and which patriotic Frenchmen and Frenchwomen drape in mourning and half bury in immortelles, in memory of that city of Alsace which so long was French, but which to-day is German one of Germany's great prizes taken in the war of 1870.
In later times the Government of Geneva made some reparation for their harsh treatment of a famous citizen, and erected his statue, modelled by his compatriot, Pradier, on an island in the Rhone. "See nations, slowly wise and meanly just, To buried merit raise the tardy bust." November, 1896. I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator.
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