The motif is again drawn from Roman history, this time via a drama by Corneille with which David was familiar. The three sons of the old Horace, who occupies the centre of the canvas, were chosen by the Romans to meet the Albans in single combat, the latter being also represented by three brothers, the Curiatii. It had been agreed that this combat should decide which race would have dominion over the other. The victory fell to the Horatii, the representatives of Rome. Two of the brothers fell in combat with the Curiatii, but the third triumphed through a ruse--turning apparently in flight and killing his three opponents one after another as they pursued him. The trumpet call to freedom implicit in this composition must have rung in the ears of the youthful French patriots who crowded to see it, for it appeared at a moment when the soul of young France had been stirred by the American war of independence. It was painted in the year 1783 when Benjamin Franklin signed in Paris that treaty with England in which, for the first time, the independence of the American Union was recognized. Beyond the Atlantic there had come into existence a republic comparable to the Roman republic, an anti-monarchical conception whose ideals were sympathetic to the progressive thinkers of France, though France was, at the same time, the seat of Europe’s oldest and most absolute monarchy. How did this message of freedom from across the ocean affect the youth of France? Our artist’s ear was sensitively attuned to the ferment of radical thought. While the painters of the older school, Boucher and Fragonard, still painted their playful compositions and tried to dissemble the tragic reality, the dull rumble of the coming earthquake sounded its note in David’s paintings. His themes became ever more gruesome and inflammatory. A painting in Marseilles depicts St. Roche pleading with the Madonna to succor the sick, and the foreground is filled with dead, plague-stricken bodies. Another in Valence represents the Death of Ugolino with his Sons--that horrible scene from Dante’s _Divina Commedia_ in which the Italian general and his five sons die of hunger in a dungeon into which they have been thrown by his political enemies. [Illustration: FIG. 9. PEN SKETCH OF MARIE ANTOINETTE Made from the artist’s window as the tumbril halted on the way to the scaffold (1793) _Collection of Edmond de Rothschild, Paris_] [Illustration: FIG. 10. STUDY FROM THE ITALIAN SKETCHBOOK (1788)]