He was always perfectly dressed, his manners were elegant, and it soon grew to be the fashion to visit his studio. He used to show his pictures himself, explaining their beauties, and his extravagant remarks, absorbed as he was in himself and his work, sometimes provided more entertainment than the legitimate _raison d’être_ of the visit. All the talent and beauty of Paris, the greatest nobles, royalties, and distinguished travellers were at one time or another his guests. In a characteristic letter to a friend, Madame Roland describes her visit to see “The Broken Pitcher” we all know so well by reproductions. The original is back in the Louvre now. After speaking of the lovely colouring, fresh and charming, she says: “She holds the jar she has just broken in her arms, standing near the fountain where the accident has taken place. Her eyelids are low, and the mouth still half-open, as she tries to understand the gravity of her misfortune and does not know whether she is to blame. One can imagine nothing more piquant and pretty; the only reproach the painter merits is that he has not made the little girl sorry enough to no longer feel the temptation to return to the fountain. I said this to Greuze, and we laughed together.” With good-natured malice Madame Roland goes on to relate how when Greuze told her the Emperor Joseph II. had complimented him on the personal quality of his work, saying he was the poet of his pictures, she replied, “It is true one never quite understands how beautiful your pictures are till you describe them.” A remark which Greuze took quite seriously. The “Danæ,” now in the Louvre, and “L’Offrande à l’Amour,” in the Wallace Collection, are also mentioned in correspondence as having been shown by Greuze in his studio about this time. They are the best examples of his allegorical work--there was no branch of painting he did not attempt--but they are hardly more successful than his moral subjects, and quite lack the charm of his homely, familiar scenes. Chief among the latter may be mentioned “La paix du Ménage,” a young father and mother clasping each other tenderly as they watch their sleeping child; “La Mère Bien-aimée,” whose pretty head comes out of a crowd of the clambering children, who excited Madame Geoffrin’s ill-received remark; “Le Gouter,” a young mother feeding her two fat little boys with a spoon, while a cat sits on the table watching enviously; “Le Silence,” in which the mother, nursing one child, tells an unhappy older one not to blow his trumpet in case he wakes the babe in the cradle. Greuze was never tired of painting mothers with their little children, and the picturesque interiors in which he places them are perhaps more charming than the figures, showing, as they do, the old-world utensils and objects he had round him in his own childhood. The oddly-shaped cradle which he reproduced so often was that in which he himself had been rocked.