By nature nervous and highly strung, jealous and keenly conscious of her equivocal position, she could not make up her mind, when the painters were ordered to move their studios from the Sorbonne, either to leave Prudhon or openly to live with him. On the morning of 26th March 1821 she left her model, the little Sophie, alone, after giving her a ring. Soon afterwards a heavy fall was heard, and she was found lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Prudhon lingered on for two years more, two long years spent as it were in exile. Solitary, tortured by remorse of conscience, and with continual thoughts of suicide, he lived on only for his recollections of her, in tender converse with the memorials she had left, insensible to the renown which began gradually to gather round his name. The completion of the "Unfortunate Family," which Constance had left unfinished on her easel, was his last _tête-à-tête_ with her, his last farewell. He left his studio only to visit her grave in Père-Lachaise, or to wander alone along the outer boulevards. An "Ascension of the Virgin" and a "Christ on the Cross" were the last works of the once joyous painter of ancient mythology: the Mater Dolorosa and the Crucified--symbols of his own torments. Death at length took compassion upon him. On the 16th of February 1823 France lost Prudhon. His art was the pure expression of his spiritual life. His life was swayed by women, and something feminine breathes through all his pictures. In them there speaks a man full of soul, originally of a joyous nature, who has gone through experiences which prevented him ever being joyous again. He has inherited from the _rococo_ style its graces and its little Cupids, but has also already tasted of all the melancholy of the new age. With his smiles there is mingled a secret sadness. He has learnt that life is not an unending banquet and a perpetual pleasure; he has seen how tragic a morrow follows upon the voyage to the Isle of Cythera. The bloom has faded from his pale cheeks, his brow is furrowed--he has seen the guillotine. He, the last _rococo_ painter and the first Romanticist, would have been truly the man to effect the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century by a path more natural than that followed by David. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ CONSTANCE MAYER. THE DREAM OF HAPPINESS.]