This _silence d’éternité_ is the characteristic of Moreau’s art. Here nothing moves; all is as stiff as Lot’s wife after she was turned into a pillar of salt, as the men in the fairy-tale after the wizard has, by a wave of his magic wand, made the warm life stagnate in their veins. Moreau succeeds in reversing Pygmalion’s miracle. His brush takes the life out of every human body he paints, and turns it into a statue. In none of his figures do we feel that he painted from a model. They all give the impression of being copies from statuary, and we are, for instance, not surprised that his manifestly unfinished “Moses Looking at the Promised Land” has a long bearded head as white as marble on an almost flesh-coloured body. We assume that Moreau has here simply reproduced the natural colour of his stone prototype. Among all his thousand works, one alone has really struck me as having something like a stir of passion traceable, viz., his “Messalina.” The abominable empress, slave of her animal passions, is ascending the dirty couch at a den in the Suburra. The young vulgarian whom she has beckoned to her clasps her waist with both arms; the attendant torch-bearer of the crowned slut turns her head away from the repulsive sight. One can very well understand the movement of this slave who is ashamed of her mistress, but has only to obey and hold her tongue. The eagerness, too, with which the youth kneeling before the couch creeps up to the body that is offered him, is true and warm. Here is real life, even if in one of its lowest manifestations. But Messalina herself, though the protagonist of this tragedy of Cæsarean madness, is again entirely Moreau. With her stony repose in a situation with which it is so inconsistent, with her Assyrian fish-bladder-eyed profile, she resembles an idol in a Babylonian temple, and one wonders how the passion of the favoured one can endure the icy coldness gleaming from this idol.