But the student of French history and lover of French art will infallibly be drawn to the works of the native French schools, and especially to those of the earlier masters. For the extraordinary collection of French Primitifs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, exhibited at Paris in 1904, and the publication of Dimier's[170] uncompromising and powerful defence of those critics, who, like himself, deny the existence of any indigenous French school of painting whatsoever, have concentrated the attention of the artistic world on this passionately debated controversy. The writer well remembers, some twenty years since, being impressed by certain characteristic traits in the few examples of early French painting hung in the Louvre, and desiring the opportunity of a wider field of observation. Such opportunity has at length been given. Now, while it is quite true that most of the examples of the so-called Franco-Flemish school exhibited in the Pavilion de Marsan would pass, and have passed, unquestioned when seen among a collection of Flemish paintings, yet when massed together, they do display more or less well-defined extra-Flemish and extra-Italian characteristics--a modern feeling for nature and an intimate realism in the treatment of landscape, a freer, more supple and more vivacious drawing of the human figure--that produce a cumulative effect which is almost irresistible, and may be reasonably explained by the theory of a school of painters expressing independent local feeling and genius. We include, of course, the illuminated MSS. exhibited in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Books of Hours at Chantilly by Fouquet and by Pol de Limbourg and his brothers. The latter, by some authorities, are believed to have been the nephews of Malouel, and to have studied their art at Paris. The theory of the existence of a national French school, analogous to the _post_-revolutionary school of painting, is, of course, untenable, for France, as a nation, can scarcely be said to have existed, in the wider sense of the term, before the end of Louis XI.'s reign. When that monarch came to the throne Paris and North France had been sorely exhausted by the century of the English wars; Burgundy was an independent state; Provence, with its capital Aix, and Avignon were independent counties, ruled by the Counts of Provence and the Pope. A more rational classification into schools would perhaps, as Dimier has hinted, follow the lines of racial division--French and Teutonic. For many of the Flemish artists were French in race, as, for instance, Roger Van der Weyden, who was known to Italians as Rogerus Gallicus, and called himself Roger de la Pasture. [Illustration: LE MAITRE DE MOULINS. TRIPTYCH OF MOULINS.] [Illustration: JUVENAL DES URSINS. FOUQUET.]