As no amelioration took place, Bastien-Lepage made the return journey to Paris towards the end of May, 1884. He went back to his studio in the Rue Legendre, where he had formerly passed such happy hours in the full enjoyment of a talent at its zenith and a constitution apparently able to defy all tests. Now, however, he dragged around a dying body, with disease gnawing at his vitals. He could no longer sleep without the aid of powerful doses of morphine. The winter-time increased his suffering; his strength rapidly failed him; and, on the tenth of December, at six o'clock in the evening, he drew his last breath, at the age of thirty-six years. As long as he could hold a brush, Bastien-Lepage continued to work, in spite of the sufferings which racked him. During the year preceding his death, while he was already experiencing frightful tortures, he painted _The Woman making Lye_ and _The Little Chimney-sweep_, the latter of which is here reproduced. This admirable canvas is to be seen now at the studio of the painter's brother at Neuilly, and forms part of the legacy which M. Émile Bastien-Lepage intends to bequeath to the Louvre. It has never been shown at any Salon, and for that matter there are a good many other paintings and portraits which have never been exhibited in public and which are not for that reason any the less remarkable. We may cite at random: _The Portrait of M. É. Bastien-Lepage_, _The Prince of Wales_, _Mme. Juliette Drouet_, _A Little Girl going to School_, _The Little Pedler asleep_, _The Vintage_, _No Help! The Thames at London, etc._ The very year of his death, shortly before his departure for Algeria, Bastien-Lepage executed a delicious little canvas entitled _The Forge_, in which the artist expended a surprising amount of talent and skill, and which enables us to realize what extraordinary heights his ever progressive genius might have attained, but for the blind and brutal cruelty of Destiny. His death was a time of mourning for the arts; the regrets which he left behind him were unanimous. Even those who had been opposed to his aesthetic creed paid homage to his great conscientiousness as an artist and his noble character as a man. During March and April, 1885, only a few months after his death, all literary and artistic Paris flocked to the Hotel de Chimay, an adjunct to the École des Beaux-Arts, where a posthumous exhibition of his works had been organized. At this exhibition the entire body of his works had been brought together. The museums had loaned the canvases which they possessed and the private collectors had done their share towards the glorification of the artist by entrusting to the organizers a goodly number of paintings and portraits which had never figured in any of the Salons.