That, putting it briefly, was the course of his work. What was the course of his life apart from work?--the course, I mean, of that second life of the artist in painting or literature which is separate from his production, yet must affect it so much? How about the people who were nearest to him?--those whose society gave him his pleasure or withheld it? Chardin was twice married. While he was still engaged in the struggles of his youth, before his position was assured, he met a young girl, Marguerite Saintar, at some modest merrymaking, where his parents had planned that he should find her. Whether or not he knew of their aims, his own wishes seemed to have been at one with theirs. He liked Marguerite Saintar, who liked him in return. The attachment appears indeed to have been so mutual that in their loves there was no place for the proverb of the ‘one who kisses’ and ‘the other who holds out the cheek.’ In 1728, Chardin being twenty-nine, he was received into the Academy, and by 1731 he was permitted to marry the young woman to whom he was devoted. She was still but twenty-two, but in the few years that they had waited, their positions had a good deal changed. Chardin had won a reputation to which already a certain modest money value was attached, and the girl had lost her small fortune. The painter’s father was now opposed to the marriage, but his objections were overcome. The couple were wedded for but four years. Their only child, a son, remained to Chardin, when his wife died, after a time of union troubled as to outward matters, and which, in the wife’s declining health, it must have needed either satisfied love or a happy temperament to make even fairly bright. Chardin’s was a temperament of calm--the shrewd smiling face, painted by himself when he was seventy years old, shows him yet elastic and vivacious.