St Géneviève has stepped out of her cell on to the balcony of her convent and lets her glance roam over Paris. At her feet lies the slumbering city; in the foreground surge the red-tiled roofs, between which soar a few tree-tops in the luxuriant verdure of midsummer; in the distance stretch the soft hill lines of a cheerful landscape, the green of whose meadows is interrupted, here and there, by the white mass of a convent or abbey. Slender lilies and _gladioli_ bloom in noble vessels on the balcony. In the bare cell, the door of which is wide open behind the saint, the smoking flame of a lamp of antique pattern smoulders. At the summit, in a deep blue sky, hangs the full moon, which softly illumines city and landscape, and casts an eerie gleam on the curled leafage of the tree-tops. Immersed and bathed in its soft radiance, the saint stands there, unearthly with her thin, ascetic countenance and her white nun’s habit, which from her headcloth to the trailing hem of her garment flows down in unbroken, perpendicular lines, and seems to lift up her soul in a quiet, ecstatic prayer for the slumbering town, whose peaceful prosperity is a work of her solicitous love. Here Puvis’s peculiar method triumphs in every feature. Here his temperament needed only to give itself its natural scope to attain the highest artistic result. What elsewhere is intolerable affectation becomes here the honest revelation of a mood. The subdued harmony of violet and blue in different gradations of intensity that blend softly into one another is legitimate in the picture of a summer night, which takes its sole spectral light from the moon and an oil-lamp. The paleness of the flesh is understandable in the aging nun who mortifies herself by prayer, vigils, and fasting. The simplicity of the drawing, which is reduced to a few straight and slightly though expressively curved lines, finds its defence in the dusk of the semi-transparent night which suppresses all individualities of forms; and leaves only for us general, essential features, and these rather surmised than clearly seen. Thus here a special subject finds its special and fully adequate means of expression, and the work becomes a model of what is termed style in the highest sense.