The same impression, only intensified and deepened, is felt before the busts of the “Young Girl with the Drooping Head,” the “Dutch Wife,” and the “Dutch Maiden.” This young Dutch girl is particularly adorable. I do not consider I am exaggerating when I say she ranks as a sister, though in a different technique, with the “Mona Lisa.” The maiden’s innocent eyes, which have no presentiment of the passionate secrets of Gioconda; the graceful, reposeful countenance, that seems wondering blissfully over her own blooming youth and the loveliness of the world, charm us like the miracle of a spring day. Similar joy streams from his sleeping and waking little children. The softness of this baby flesh, the delicate texture of this plump, warm, satin skin, are unattainable. Carriès discovered a new technique for the life of the outer skin, the results of which, in his hands, are amazing. He gives a delicate, perpendicular creasing to the membrane of the lips, and marks it off from the skin of the face in a discreet but firm line, so that it imparts the illusion of seeing swelling lip-red framed in mother-of-pearl. The mouths of his women are weirdly seductive. It would really not surprise me if semi-fools and lunatics were to pounce upon these ravishing lips with eager kisses. Even when Carriès is not idealising, but is reproducing portraits true to nature, he imparts to them an inwardness which seems unfathomable, like that of a deep soul. For this let any one only look at the “Bust of an Unknown Lady” and “Mother Callamand”—the former a cold, proud patrician, perhaps the Clara Vere de Vere, in whom Tennyson admires “that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere”; the latter a splendid old nun, probably an abbess, a sturdy, peasant woman who is conscious of her high rank in the convent, and in whose broad face goodness and severity, healthy power and enthusiastic spirituality, are mingled. This gift of filling the subject with inward life is the strongest element in Carriès’ genius. In a series of works which were exhibited in the Champs de Mars Salon, and are, unfortunately, not to be found in the room of the Little Palace, this cropped up overpoweringly. There were fabulous animals, monsters, which a luxuriant imagination had invented—toads, frogs, lizards of gigantic size, in positions humanly conceived, the female reposing on the breast of the male, whose eyes are closing in rapture, and delicately embraced by his paws. One might think they would have a grotesque effect; by no means. Their anthropomorphism brought them in danger of derision; but the genius of Carriès was here directly revealed. The quasi-human, emotional life manifested in their attitudes made them pathetic. The toads’ legs were not seen; their mouths and goggle eyes were not seen. People saw only the unmistakable trait of love, and were moved by this exhibition of the primitive feeling—the same in man and beast—which holds the world together.