Nanteuil and Edelinck, first united by their work, were soon fast friends, in spite of the difference of their ages, and the still greater difference of their tastes. The French engraver sent for his wife from Rheims as soon as he found himself in a fair way to success and fortune; but he had also in some degree returned to the habits of his youth. A shining light in society, and as intimate with the cultured set at Mlle. de Scudéry's as with the devotees of pleasures less strictly intellectual, his career of dissipation in the salons and fashionable taverns of the day contrasts strangely with the sober quality of his talent, and increases our surprise at the number of works which he produced. Even his declining health did not change his habits. Till the end he continued to divide his time between his work and the world; and at his death, in 1678, at the age of fifty-two, he left nothing, or almost nothing, to his wife, in spite of the large sums he had made since he came to Paris. [Illustration: FIG. 84.--JEAN PESNE. Nicolas Poussin.] Edelinck's fate was very different. He lived in seclusion, given over to his art and to the one ambition of becoming churchwarden (_marguillier_) of his parish: a position refused him, it is said, as reserved for tradesmen and official personages, and with which he was only at length invested by the condescending interference of the king. It was probably the only favour personally solicited by Edelinck, but it was by no means the first he owed to the protection of Louis XIV. Before the churchwardenship he held the title of "Premier Dessinateur du Cabinet." Like Lebrun, like Mansart and Le Nôtre, he was a Knight of St. Michael, and the Academy of Painting elected him as one of its council. His old age, like the rest of his days, was quiet and laborious; and when he died (1707) his two brothers and his son Nicolas, who had all three been his pupils, inherited a fortune as wisely husbanded as it had been honourably acquired. Edelinck survived the principal engravers of the reign of Louis XIV. François de Poilly, Roullet, Masson, and Jean Pesne, had more or less closely followed Nanteuil to the grave. At the Gobelins, once so rich in ability of the first order, students had taken the place of masters, and clever craftsmen succeeded to artists of genuine inspiration. Van Schuppen had followed Nanteuil, as Mignard had Lebrun, from necessity rather than right. And last of all, Gérard Audran, the most distinguished engraver of the time--whom, for the sake of clearness in our narrative, we have not yet mentioned--had died in 1703; and though members of his family did honour to the name he had distinguished, none of them were able to sustain the full weight of its glory. [Illustration: FIG. 85.--GÉRARD AUDRAN. "La Noblesse." After Raphael.]