What has Monsieur Courbet to do among these people? He is a painter, not a politician. A few beery speeches uttered at the Hautefeuille Café cannot turn his past into a revolutionary one, and an order refused for the simple reason that it is more piquant for a man to have his button-hole without ornament than with a slip of red ribbon in it, when it is well known that he disdains whatever every one else admires, is but a poor title to fame. To your last, Napoleon Gaillard![57] To your paint-brushes, Gustave Courbet! And if we say this, it is not only from fear that the meagre lights of Monsieur Courbet are insufficient, and may draw the Commune into new acts of folly,—(though we scarcely know, alas! if there be any folly the Commune has left undone,)—but it is, above all, because we fear the odium and ridicule that the false politician may throw upon the painter. Yes! whatever may be our horror for the nude women and unsightly productions with which Monsieur Courbet[58] has honoured the exhibitions of paintings, we remember with delight several, admirably true to nature, with sunshine and summer breezes playing among the leaves, and streams murmuring refreshingly over the pebbles, and rocks whereon climbing plants cling closely; and, besides these landscapes, a good picture here and there, executed, if not by the hand of an artist—for the word artist possesses a higher meaning in our eyes—at least by the hand of a man of some power, and we hate that this painter should be at the Hôtel de Ville at the moment when the spring is awakening in forest and field, and when he would do so much better to go into the woods of Meudon or Fontainebleau to study the waving of the branches and the eccentric twists and turns of the oak-tree’s huge trunk, than in making answers to Monsieur Lefrançais—iconoclast in theory only as yet—and to Monsieur Jules Vallès, who has read Homer in Madame Dacier’s translation, or has never read it at all. That one should try a little of everything, even of polities, when one is capable of nothing else, is, if not excusable, at any rate comprehensible; but when a man can make excellent boots like Napoleon Gaillard, or good paintings like Gustave Courbet, that he should deliberately lay himself open to ridicule, and perhaps to everlasting execration, is what we cannot admit. To this Monsieur Courbet would reply: “It is the artists that I represent; it is the rights and claims of modern art that I uphold. There must be a great revolution in painting as in politics; we must federate too, I tell you; we’ll decapitate those aristocrats, the Titians and Paul Veroneses; we’ll establish, instead of a jury, a revolutionary tribunal, which shall condemn to instant death any man who troubles himself about the ideal—that king whom we have knocked off his throne; and at this tribunal I will be at once complainant, lawyer, and judge. Yes! my brother painters, rally around me, and we will die for the Commune of Art.