A few yards away, in the Rue de l'Hôpital, we came to a little inn with the pretty sign "Au Point de Jour," and the inscription on a board, in capital letters: "Avan le jour commence ta journée De l'Eternel le sainct nom bénissant Loue le encore et passe ainsy lannée Ayme Dieu et ton procchain. 1672." A little girl, who had been sitting before the inn, approached. Pointing to the inscription, she said scornfully: "That's not French." "Pardon, mon enfant," I said, "But it is most certainly French." The little maid looked rather guilty for a moment. Then she cheered up. This French that puzzled her must be a local patois. "Oh, well then," she said. "C'est que je ne suis pas d'ici." (I am not from this part of the country) and she trotted off up the street. The landlady and coffee had so fully monopolized our attention that we had bestowed no more than a passing glance upon the statue of Greuze, opposite to which we had been sitting. I doubt whether it deserved more. Surely the most satisfactory monuments to the famous Burgundian painter are the house in which he was born,[133] the studies from his brush and pencil, to be seen in the local musée, and the rich meadows by the Saône. All these complete a setting that enables us better to sympathize with Greuze's fresh and delicate art. The painter's life, like that of his fellow-Burgundian, Prudhon, fell short of happiness. Friction with the authorities of the Academy, and the merited failure of his classical work, "The Emperor Severus and Caracalla"--the very title calls up a smile, when we think of it in connection with the painter of "La Cruche Cassée"--caused him to cease exhibiting at the Salon, until the Revolution had opened the way for all painters. Yet the apparent failure was a blessing in disguise; it taught him his limitations, and brought him back from the stilted manner of his time, to the call of individual genius, and the freshness of nature. He had other troubles; not the least of which was an ill-chosen wife. Mdlle Babuti, whose charming face he has reproduced on so many canvasses, was not so easy to live with as her picture, perhaps idealized by the painter, would lead us to believe; and Greuze himself lacked that touch of philosophy which would have counterbalanced his natural sprightliness of character. Finally came the crowning disaster, the Revolution, that robbed him of nearly all he possessed; so that, though the Convention gave him lodgings in the vacant chambers at the Louvre, he died in complete poverty. Shortly before his death, he remarked to his friend, Barthélemy: "At my funeral you will be the poor man's dog." It is said that Napoleon, hearing of the painter's wretched end, said: "If I had known his situation, I would have given him a Sèvres vase full of gold, in payment for all his cruches cassées."[134]