As a whole, the work offers a new and excellent type of the religious sculpture of our age. The artist has set aside classical lessons and proved himself in the right. The remembrances of antiquity should not interfere in the realization of an ideal taken from the very heart of contemporary life and the present Christian age. Gothic traditions are even neglected, and the author has been careful to give the figure the seal of its own time, his good taste causing him to avoid the quicksands into which so many others have fallen. Wishing to represent a man of our time, the sculptor would have committed an anachronism to be regretted if he had impressed his character with a mysticism and power which distinguished the personages of the art of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the spirit of truth he was to give to the world a saint, and in this saint the beatific expression which in the prerogative of the saints of every age; but over and above this general feature there was an order of secondary shades he was obliged to respect, to give to the figure its age and physiognomy. {205} M. Cabuchet has admirably seized and rendered the double character I have tried to define. His saint is as mystical as the saints of the middle ages, yet he has the reality of a man of our time. Gothic, or rather Christian, in sentiment, he is modern, and even French, in his exterior aspect. Such, in a few words, is the exact appreciation shown in this work of M. Cabuchet, and the double reflection gives him, in my opinion, the highest rank among sculptors of his age. The imitation of antiquity would have produced a dead work; the imitation of the middle ages would have produced a work impersonal and hieratic; but going out of himself and all national traditions, inspired only with his subject and his time, the artist has brought to light a new and striking piece of work, a true specimen of religious and modern sculpture. It is easy to see what remembrances and what masters have directed this statue. French sculpture, as its painting, has particular traits which are easily recognized. Less correct, perhaps, and less noble than Greek or Italian sculpture, it has an ease, a power, a life, that has no equal. Puget and Houdon are the two foremost artists in our school, so essentially French. Using Greek models only to simplify and enrich their style, they have sought beyond everything expression and the power of motion. M. Cabuchet has followed their example, and, walking in their footsteps, has given us a work of which his masters could not be ashamed.