One day I caught him painting a sketch of the little stone church on the shore at the edge of the town, something we had all tried. He was drawing and painting, with meticulous care, every slate on the roof, each with its little lichen. I brought the subject up, after dinner, when we were sitting on the sidewalk having our coffee. “M. Bastien,” I said (no one ever called him Le Page) “we have all been taught by Le Febvre, Boulanger, Cabanel, and Durand to _ebaucher_ our subject broadly and put in only the details that are absolutely necessary. I saw you to-day painting every slate on that roof for its own sake. How about it?” He laughed. “I have tried all these different methods, but none of them got me what I saw; so now I do everything as truthfully as I am able, then take my picture to Paris, where, in my studio, away from nature, I can consider it broadly and remove all the unnecessary detail.” “Yes,” said Harrison, “but when we younger men see your picture in the Salon we don’t think you have done what you say you do.” He threw his hands in the air. “_Helas! Helas! Sacré Nom de Dieu! Vous avez raison._ I am so much in love with it when I see it in my studio that I cannot bear to touch it.” Bastien was born in Domremy, which was probably the reason he made such an admirable painting of Jeanne d’Arc, now in the Metropolitan Museum. He told us the details of the work. There was no one model, except for the body, and he used several to carry out his ideal of the head. You feel that she is a working girl and not a pretty peasant by Bougereau. Albert Wolff wrote a stinging criticism of it, commenting on the charm of the figure and the excellence of the drawing and painting, but saying that the visions in the air were idiotic. Bastien replied that the visions were not supposed to be those of a learned man like Wolff or, indeed, his own, but those born in the brain of Jeanne d’Arc, an uneducated girl of sixteen, whose only knowledge of kings and queens was of the figures of the saints she had worshiped in church. He handled this canvas in quite an original way, and not a very successful one. It was painted in two pieces, so that it could be easily carried to the orchard where he worked. When finished, he and the village cobbler sewed them together by hand, with the best linen thread and cobbler’s wax. They then stretched it and hammered the joining, which was filled with white and siccatif and scraped down. When it was firm and dry, he went over it so there should be no question of the surface, and repainted it, and, as he said, “I wager anything that that crack does not show in a thousand years.” Alas, it is plainly evident in the Metropolitan to-day, and the repainting must have changed, as the color and tone where the crack is are all wrong.