Notwithstanding the love that made the keynote of his character, all the investigations of the curious have not discovered an "affair of the heart" in Corot's life story. It is a story to all intents and purposes without a woman in it: or, if that is saying too much, certainly without a heroine. There has been some attempt to exalt his relations with "Mademoiselle Rose" to the level of a romance, but it has failed completely for want of materials. Mademoiselle Rose was one of his mother's work girls, and in those early days, when he was but newly emancipated from the bondage of drapery, she used to come to see him at his painter-work. She never married, and thirty-five years later Corot still counted her among his friends, and she visited him from time to time. It is a little romance of friendship, if you like, it may have been on the part of Mademoiselle Rose something more--who knows?--but it cannot count as a Corot love-affair on the evidence that is available. As far as is known this is the nearest approach to a "love interest" in the life of the artist. It may have been that he looked upon women too much with the eye of an artist ever to be able to see them merely as a man; more probably it was the element of austerity in him that kept him immune from passion. With all his intense delight in life and in living, Corot was always detached; always preserved, as by a religious habit, from actual contact with the world around him. Through the midst of the follies, the extravagances, and the vices of Romanticist circles in Paris of the thirties, he passed without coming to any harm, and characteristically enough, without losing his regard for some of the wildest of a wild company. He took part in much of the "fun" that was going on, but though often in the set he was never of it, and so far as can be judged it did not influence him, or colour his outlook upon life, in the slightest degree. I think it was this temperamental detachment, and possibly a sense, unexpressed even to himself, of being vowed to one particular service, that prevented Corot from ever "falling in love," as the phrase goes. Or, to put it another way, his life was so full of his art, that there was no room within its limits for another dominating interest. Simple and single-minded, happily pursuing the occupation that of all others he would have chosen, he made his life a work of art more lovely than the most beautiful of his paintings. No one can live in such a world as this for the allotted span and more without becoming acquainted with grief, but Corot knew none of those searing sorrows which scorch their way into heart and brain, until they make existence a burden hardly to be borne. His faith in "the good God," to whom he looked up with so childlike a confidence, was so complete that sorrow for him could hold no bitterness; nor, deeply sympathetic as he was, had it power over an impregnable content and an unfailing serenity.