But if the room where the child first saw the light were gloomy enough within, the skies were wondrous blue without, and the violet-scented slopes were robed in a tender garment of silvery green, decked with the gold of orange-trees, and enriched with bright embroidery of many-coloured flowers that were gay as the gayest ribbons of distant Paris. And the glory of it bathed the lad's eyes and heart for sixteen years, so that his hands got them itching to create the splendour of it which sang within him; and the wizardry of the flower-garden of France never left him, casting its spell over all his thinking, and calling to him to utter it to the world. It stole into his colour-box, and on to his palette, and so across the canvas into his master-work, and was to lead him through the years to a blithe immortality. The small boy with the big head was born in the year after François Boucher came back to Paris from his Italian wanderings on the eve of his thirties and won to academic honour. The child grew up in his Provençal home, whilst Boucher, turning his back upon academic art on gaining his seat at the Academy, was creating the Pastorals, Venus-pieces, and Cupid-pieces that changed the whole style of French art from the pompous and mock-heroic manner of Louis Quatorze's century of the sixteen hundreds to the gay and elegant pleasaunces that fitted so aptly the elegant pleasure-seeking days of Louis the Fifteenth's seventeen hundreds. Gossip of high politics came trickling down to Grasse as slowly as the fashions, yet the eleven-year-old boy's ears heard of the death of the minister, old Cardinal Fleury, and of the effort of Louis to become king by act. Though Louis had small genius for the mighty business, and fell thenceforth into the habit of ruling France from behind petticoats, raising the youngest of the daughters of the historic and noble house of De Nesle to be his accepted consort under the rank and honours of Duchess of Chateauroux. All tongues tattled of the business, the very soldiery singing mocking songs; when--Louis strutting it as conqueror with the army, got the small-pox at Metz, and sent the Chateauroux packing at the threat of death. He recovered, to enter Paris soon after as the Well-Beloved, and to be reconciled with the frail Chateauroux before she died in the sudden agony in which she swore she had been poisoned. [Illustration: PLATE II.--THE MUSIC LESSON (In the Louvre) Fragonard had a profound admiration for the Dutch painters. Whether he went to Holland shortly after his marriage is not known; but he seems suddenly to have employed his brush as if he had come across fine examples of the Dutch school. "The Music Lesson" at the Louvre is one of these, and the Dutch influence is most marked both as to subject, treatment, and handling of the paint, if we allow for Fragonard's own strongly French personality.]