"_Psyche approaching with her lamp to surprise Love in his sleep._--The two figures are of flesh and blood, but they have neither the elegance, nor the grace, nor the delicacy that the subject required. Love seems to me to be making a grimace. Psyche is not like a woman who comes trembling on tiptoe. I do not see on her face that mixture of surprise, fear, love, desire, and admiration, which ought all to be there. It is not enough to show in Psyche a curiosity to see Love; I must also perceive in her the fear of awakening him. She ought to have her mouth half open, and to be afraid of drawing her breath. 'Tis her lover that she sees--that she sees for the first time, at the risk of losing him for ever. What joy to look upon him, and to find him so fair! Oh, what little intelligence in our painters, how little they understand nature! The head of Psyche ought to be inclined towards Love; the rest of her body drawn back, as it is when you advance towards a spot where you fear to enter, and from which you are ready to flee back; one foot planted on the ground and the other barely touching it. And the lamp; ought she to let the light fall on the eyes of Love? Ought she not to hold it apart, and to shield it with her hand to deaden its brightness? Moreover, that would have lighted the picture in a striking way. These good people do not know that the eyelids have a kind of transparency; they have never seen a mother coming in the night to look at her child in the cradle, with a lamp in her hand, and fearful of awakening it."[42] [42] x. 121. There have been many attempts to imitate this manner since Diderot. No less a person than M. Thiers tried it, when it fell to him as a young writer for the newspapers to describe the Salon of 1822. One brilliant poet, novelist, traveller, critic, has succeeded, and Diderot's art-criticism is at least equalled in Theophile Gautier's pages on Titian's Assunta and Bellini's Madonna at Venice, or Murillo's Saint Anthony of Padua at Seville.[43] [43] _Voyage en Italie_, 230. _Voyage en Espagne_, 330. See the same critic's _Abecedaire du Salon de 1861_.