Not that any one cared. On the contrary, every one, moralists included, was libertine in the eighteenth century, and “_deshabillé et désir_” only stamped a painter as being the mirror of his times. So Greuze’s name took on still more lustre as his rosebuds grew into roses whose morning dew sparkled beneath the voluptuousness that began to bow their lovely heads. “Love-Dreams,” “Bacchantes,” “Desire,” “Flora,” “Volupté”--there is a host of canvases bearing similar titles; and there are many others with symbolic names showing girls weeping sentimental griefs over emblematic objects, such as broken mirrors, dead birds, crushed flowers, broken eggs or jars, a kind of badinage that was the fashion then. In a way, he had also great success with his numerous portraits. He never got beneath the surface, was not psychological enough to express the soul of his sitter, but the fleshy envelope he reproduced with skill. The pictures of his friends Pigalle and Sylvestre, and an excellent one of the engraver Wille, whose prints, advertisements, and praises did so much to extend the Greuze cult, are well known; and in the vogue that followed his first success, he received commissions to paint the Dauphin and other important personages. In spite of its dull colour, the portrait of the painter Jeaurat, now in the Louvre, is an interesting piece of work, showing characterisation, the brilliant eyes giving the impression of a man accustomed to observe closely and see most things. But naturally Greuze was at his best when he painted women. Very beautiful is the picture of the Marquise de Chauvelin, at present in the collection of Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, and some of his portraits of his wife justly caused a sensation. [Illustration: PLATE V.--L’OISEAU MORT “L’Oiseau Mort,” or “The Dead Bird,” bequeathed by Baron Arthur de Rothschild to the Louvre, shows one of Greuze’s most beautiful child-figures, a little girl who has just found her bird dead. You forget the mannered pose of the hands and arms, to admire their curves and dimples. The delicacy of the little grieving face is beyond praise, with the tears starting beneath the downcast lashes, and a mouth that seems to quiver under the stir of shadow that plays round it.] To turn for a moment from the artist to the man, it goes without saying that one so sensitive to the beauty of woman must have been susceptible to her influence, and Greuze’s numerous heart-histories are all the more interesting in that they are as creditable to his chivalry as they are romantic. His first _grande passion_ was his boyish love for the wife of his master Grandon at Lyons, a woman with grown-up daughters. He nursed this adoration in silence, and it was one of the idol’s daughters who afterwards told how she once surprised the love-sick youth passionately kissing one of her mother’s shoes he had found under a table.