his sons who have been implicated in a monarchical conspiracy, was greeted as allegorical of the incorruptible justice of republicanism. The populace saw in it the "glorification of the chastisement of all traitors to liberty," and acclaimed David because he "had founded the sinewy style which should characterise the heroic deeds of the revolutionaries, children of liberty, equality, and fraternity." And one understands--when one also adds the influence of Napoleon--this reaction of military simplicity against the effeminacy of _rococo_. [Illustration: DAVID. MADAME RÉCAMIER.] David, at the outbreak of the Revolution, no longer a young man, but forty years old, was the terrible painter of the age, its despotic dictator. As a deputy in the Convention he not only ruled over painting, but also imposed his taste upon sculpture, ivory work, goldsmiths' work, and decoration. He designed the new costumes for the deputies and ministers. As organiser of public fêtes, he brought to life again the whole of republican Rome. He was one of those rare artists who are the men of their hour. To a new plebeian race, to whose feverishly excited patriotism the soft, luxurious, aristocratically reprehensible art of _rococo_ must seem as a mockery of all the rights of men, he showed, for the first time, the man, the hero who died for an idea or for his country; and he gave this man huge and elastic muscles, like those of a gladiator who struggles in the arena. He was a second Hercules, cleansing the Augæan stables; with his own strong shoulders he thrust back the petulant band of painters who had tarried too long in the island of Cythera. He applied art to the heroism of the day, gave it the martial attitude of patriotism, inspired it with the spirit of Robespierre, St. Just, and Danton. The more obtrusively his heroes paraded their patriotism, the more people saw in them a picture of the French nation, as true as a transposition could hope to be. This strained rhetorical pathos dwelt in the mind of the age. Talma moved the people to enthusiasm when he played the "Horatii" of Corneille in the classic cothurnus. When David painted, the state declamations of the orators still rang in his ears. Robespierre is said to have spoken from the tribune slowly, rhythmically, artistically: a Bossuet in his rostrum, a Boileau in his chair, while the volcano quivered beneath his very feet: his philippics were carefully divided into three sections, like academic discourses: his patriotism resolved itself into tirades with correctly composed periods. In David's pictures we have an exact correspondence with all this: the rigid classicality of his composition, figures grouped as though on parade; his cold pathos, the counterpart to that of the orators' fine sentiments set forth in fine phrases.