His "Flight of Louis XVIII" in the Museum at Versailles, shows him once more at his former height. It is "one of the finest of modern works," as Delacroix called it in 1848, in an essay contributed to the _Revue des Deux Mondes_; at once familiar and serious. Napoleon had left Elba, marched on Paris, and had reached Fontainebleau, when, in the night of the 19th-20th March 1815, Louis XVIII determined to evacuate the Tuileries with all speed. Accompanied by a few faithful followers and by the officers of his personal service, he abandons his palace and takes leave of the National Guards. There is something pathetic in this sexagenarian with his erudite Bourbon profile, immortalised in the large five-franc pieces of his reign, with his protruding stomach and small thick legs, looking like a dropsical patient going to hospital. His bearing is most unkingly. Gros has boldly depicted the scene, even to the pathological appearance of the king, just as he saw it, forgetting all that he knew of antique art. He had himself seen the staircase, the murmuring crowd, the lackeys hurrying by, lantern in hand, at their wits' end, and the fat, gouty king, who in his terror has forgotten all kingly dignity. That was an historical picture, and yet as he painted it he reproached himself anew for having forsaken the "real art of historical painting." At the funeral of Girodet in 1824 the members of the Institute talked of their "irreparable loss," and of the necessity of finding a new leader for the school who should avert with a strong hand that destruction which hot-headed young men threatened to bring upon it. "You, Gros," observed one of them, "should be the man for the place." And Gros answered, in absolute despair; "Why, I have not only no authority as leader of a school, but, over and above that, I have to accuse myself of giving the first bad example of defection from real art." The more he thought of David, the more he turned his back upon the world of real life. With his large and wearisome picture of "Hercules causing Diomedes to be devoured by his own Horses" (1835) he sealed his own fate. Conventionality had conquered nature. [Illustration: GROS. SAUL.]