Is it not strange, that Champagne has been put in the Flemish school?[145] He was born at Brussels, it is true, but he came very early to Paris, and his true master was Poussin, who counselled him. He devoted his talent to France, lived there, died there, and what is decisive, his manner is wholly French. Will it be said that he owes to Flanders his color? We respond that this quality is balanced by a grave defect that he also owes to Flanders, the want of ideality in the figures; and it was from France that he learned how to repair this defect by beauty of moral expression. Champagne is inferior to Lesueur and Poussin, but he is of their family. He was, also, of those artists contemporaneous with Corneille, simple, poor, virtuous, Christian.[146] Champagne worked both for the convent of the Carmelites in the _Rue St. Jacques_, that venerable abode of ardent and sublime piety, and Port-Royal, that place of all others that contained in the smallest space the most virtue and genius, so many admirable men and women worthy of them. What has become of that famous crucifix that he painted for the Church of the Carmelites, a master-piece of perspective that upon a horizontal plane appeared perpendicular? It perished with the holy house. The _Last Supper_ (_Cene_) is a living picture, on account of the truth of all the figures, movements, and postures, but to my eyes it is blemished by the absence of the ideal. I am obliged to say as much of the _Repast with Simon the Pharisee_. The _chef-d'oeuvre_ of Champagne is the _Apparition of St. Gervais and St. Protais to St. Ambrose in a Basilica of Milan_. All the qualities of French art are seen in it,--simplicity and grandeur in composition, with a profound expression. On that canvas are only four personages, the two martyrs and St. Paul, who presents them to St. Ambrose. Those four figures fill the temple, lighted above all in the obscurity of the night, by the luminous apparition. The two martyrs are full of majesty. St. Ambrose, kneeling and in prayer, is, as it were, seized with terror.[147]