If I understand anything of these matters, Antony Watteau paints that delicate life of Paris so excellently, with so much spirit, partly [27] because, after all, he looks down upon it or despises it. To persuade myself of that, is my womanly satisfaction for his preference--his apparent preference--for a world so different from mine. Those coquetries, those vain and perishable graces, can be rendered so perfectly, only through an intimate understanding of them. For him, to understand must be to despise them; while (I think I know why) he nevertheless undergoes their fascination. Hence that discontent with himself, which keeps pace with his fame. It would have been better for him--he would have enjoyed a purer and more real happiness--had he remained here, obscure; as it might have been better for me! It is altogether different with Jean-Baptiste. He approaches that life, and all its pretty nothingness, from a level no higher than its own; and beginning just where Antony Watteau leaves off in disdain, produces a solid and veritable likeness of it and of its ways. March 1715. There are points in his painting (I apprehend this through his own persistently modest observations) at which he works out his purpose more excellently than Watteau; of whom he has trusted himself to speak at last, with a wonderful self-effacement, pointing out in each of his pictures, for the rest so just and true, how [28] Antony would have managed this or that, and, with what an easy superiority, have done the thing better--done the impossible. February 1716.