Caran d'Ache's masterpiece, however--and it may honestly be styled a masterpiece--was not the 'Return from the Bois de Boulogne' but his 'Epopée,' his epic evocation of the grand army of Napoleon. Single figures like the Little Corporal on horseback, and like Murat and others of the Emperor's staff, he projected with a fidelity and a veracity of accent worthy of Détaille or even Meissonier. Yet fine as these single figures might be, they were only what had been attempted by earlier exponents of the art--even if they were more impressive than had been achieved by any one of his predecessors. These single figures were necessarily presented all on the same plane, and the startling and successful innovation of the Franco-Russian draftsmanship was his skilful use of perspective, a device which had not occurred to any of those in whose footsteps he was following, even Lemercier de Neuville having presented his ballet dancers in a flat row. What Caran d'Ache did was to bring before us company after company of the Old Guard, and troop after troop of cuirassiers, their profiles diminishing in height as the figures receded from the eye. He thus attained to an effect of solidity and even of immensity, far beyond anything ever before achieved by any earlier exhibitor of shadows. He succeeded in suggesting space, and of maneuvering before the astonished eyes of the entranced spectators a vast mass of men under arms, marching forward resolutely in serried ranks to victory or to death. The late Jules Lemaître, the most open-minded of French dramatic critics, and the most hospitable in his attitude toward the minor manifestations of theatric art, has recorded that this Napoleonic epic of Caran d'Ache communicated to him not only an emotion of actual grandeur, but also the thrill of war itself. He declared that "by the exactness of the perspective preserved in his long files of soldiers, Caran d'Ache gives us the illusion of number and of a number immense and indefinite. And by the automatic movement which sets all his troops in action at once, he gives us the illusion of a single soul, of a communal thought animating innumerable bodies--and thereby he evokes in us the impression of measureless power.... His silent poem, with its sliding profiles is, I think, the only epic in all French literature." And those who are familiar with the other French efforts to attain to lyric largeness, and who have had also the unforgetable felicity of beholding Caran d'Ache's marvelous projection of the Napoleonic legend, will be prepared to admit that Lemaître did not overstate the case. [Illustration: _Reproduced by permission of E. Flammarion, Paris_ The Sphinx II: Moses leading his people out of Egypt From a shadow picture by Amédée Vignola] III