On a panel in the _salon de compagnie_ the ill-fated Celadon was represented, plunging with graceful contortions into the blue waters of the Lignon, which rippled in circles in anticipation of his fall. Behind him the incomparable Astrée, giving free vent to her tears, ran up too late to stop him, although his foot was almost in the shepherdess's hand. Above this pathetic group a tree, more like a sheep than the sheep themselves in those fantastic fields, reared to the ceiling its fleecy, curly branches. But, in order not to rend the heart by this lamentable spectacle of the demise of Celadon, the artist had represented him, on the same panel, on the other side of the Lignon, tossed up by the water, and lying betwixt life and death among the bushes, but rescued by "three lovely nymphs, whose unbound hair fell in waves over their shoulders, covered with a garland of pearls of divers shapes. The sleeves of their gowns were turned back to the elbow, whence a shirred undersleeve of thin lawn extended to the wrist, where two large bracelets of pearls secured it. Each one had at her side the quiver filled with arrows, and carried in her hand an ivory bow. Their dresses were turned up so that their gilded buskins could be seen halfway to the knee." Beside these lovely creatures stood little Meril guarding their chariot, shaped like a shell, with a parasol above, and drawn by two horses which might readily have been mistaken for sheep, their eyes were so mild and their heads so round. The next panel represented the shepherd, saved and supported by the obliging nymphs, and busily discharging through his mouth all the water of the Lignon which he had swallowed; which occupation did not prevent his saying, in words written all along the gushing stream: "If I survive, how can Astrée's cruelty fail to kill me?" During this soliloquy Sylvie said to Galatée: "There is in his manners and his speech something more noble than the title of shepherd denotes." And, above the group, Cupid discharged an arrow larger than himself into Galatée's heart, although he aimed at her shoulder, through the fault of a tree which prevented him from taking the proper position. But the arrows of love are so adroit! What shall I say of the third panel, which pictured the terrible combat between the blond Filandre and the redoubtable Moor, who held his opponent spitted through the body, while the valiant shepherd, in nowise disconcerted, skilfully buried the iron-shod point of his crook between the monster's eyes? And of the fourth panel, whereon the fair Mélandre, in the armor of Chevalier Triste, was led into the presence of the cruel Lypandas? But who does not know the marvels of that _fair land of tapestry_, as one of our poets calls it, a fantastic, smiling land, wherein our youthful imaginations saw and dreamed of so many wondrous things?