Through this fresh _nuance_, which classicism thus acquired, the ground was cut from under the feet of those who devoted themselves to the study of the antique as conceived by Diderot. The new moral age would have no traffic with those artists in whom the last smile of the eighteenth century was personified. Their pictures, full of grace and caprice, fell into the same disrepute into which everything of yesterday had come, and it was only with a bitter smile that they followed the course of events. The younger Moreau, that animated master of _rococo_, became academically cold and tedious when he designed his book on the French costume of the Revolution. The good Fragonard, who was only fifty-nine in 1789, and lived till 1806, saw himself hooted in spite of his "Choereas." He, the true representative of frivolous tenderness, of fair and roseate hues, had lost every right to exist in the new world, and ended his life by a sad death when, after the Reign of Terror, there was no longer a place for _fêtes galantes_. A delightful portrait of himself, which he painted in the first period of the Revolution, shows us an old man, clothed entirely in black, softly melancholy, standing in a formal, dusky-brown salon. On the table on which his arm rests lies a guitar, at his feet a portfolio of engravings; but he neither plays the guitar nor looks at the prints. In the shadows of the falling evening he reminds himself forlornly of past days, and his bald forehead, where so many rose-coloured dreams have passed, is overcast with gloomy shadows. Greuze, too, outlived himself. It was no use for him to pretend more and more to the utmost virtue, and to paint an "Ariadne at Naxos." He died in misery and oblivion in 1805. The demands which this new classicism made were able to be satisfied by no one any longer, not even by Vien. However loudly he might proclaim himself a student of the Greeks, he, nevertheless, remained a very timid and lukewarm revolutionary. An old man, cold and peaceful and stolid, moderate in everything, he had neither the energy nor the audacity of the reformer. He had been the Court painter of Louis XVI, a most monarchically disposed and loyal man, and was a suspect on this ground alone to those who were in power in 1789. His pictures, too, describe no more than the end of a world. Greuze, Fragonard, and Vien, in spite of their assumed seriousness, survived only as gallant phantoms in the new age, by the side of those men of more rugged countenance who inaugurated the nineteenth century. [Illustration: JACQUES LOUIS DAVID. _L'Art._]