The few painters who, like Regnault, were more or less independent of David's influence, or, like Prud'hon, had ventured to create an entirely original method, were admired by so small a public that their pictures were not generally reproduced in engraving, and thus could do little for the progress of the art. Some, however, of Prud'hon's drawings and pictures met, under the Directory and the Empire, with excellent interpreters in Copia and in Barthélemy Roger; while in the last years of the eighteenth century Bervic's engraving of Regnault's "Éducation d'Achille" had obtained at least as much success as the original had won in the Salon of 1783. To give a companion to this justly celebrated piece, Bervic soon after published his "Enlèvement de Déjanire," after Guido. This work, to which the judges of the Decennial Competition awarded the prize in preference to any engraving published in France from 1800 to 1810, by confirming the engraver's reputation, caused his fellow-craftsmen to return once more to the old path of progress. It must not, however, be supposed that Bervic did not himself diverge somewhat from the way of the masters: it may even be said that he was always more inclined to skirt it than to follow it resolutely. At the outset he was not sufficiently alive to the perils of facility; and later on he was apt to attach too much importance to certain quite material qualities. Yet it must be added that he never went so far as to entirely sacrifice essentials to accessories, and that more than once--in his fine full-length of Louis XVI. for instance--he displayed an ability all the more laudable as the original was by no means inspiring. [Illustration: FIG. 95.--BERVIC. "L'Éducation d'Achille." After Regnault.]