I certainly admire Champagne as an historical painter, and even as a landscape painter; but he is perhaps greatest as a portrait painter. In portraits truth and nature are particularly in their place, relieved by coloring, and idealized in proper measure by expression. The portraits of Champagne are so many monuments in which his most illustrious contemporaries will live forever. Every thing about them is strikingly real, grave, and severe, with a penetrating sweetness. Should the records of Port-Royal be lost, all Port-Royal might be found in Champagne. Among those portraits we see the inflexible Saint-Cyran,[148] as well as his persecutor, the imperious Richelieu.[149] We see, too, the learned, the intrepid Antoine Arnaud, to whom the contemporaries of Bossuet decreed the name of Great;[150] and Mme. Angelique Arnaud, with her naive and strong figure.[151] Among them is mother Agnes and the humble daughter of Champagne himself, sister St. Suzanne.[152] She has just been miraculously cured, and her whole prostrated person bears still the impress of a relic of suffering. Mother Agnes, kneeling before her, regards her with a look of grateful joy. The place of the scene is a poor cell; a wooden cross hanging on the wall, and some straw chairs, are all the ornaments. On the picture is the inscription,--_Christo uni medico animarum et corporum_, etc. There is possessed the Christian stoicism of Port-Royal in its imposing austerity. Add to all these portraits that of Champagne;[153] for the painter may be put by the side of his personages.