The painters overwhelmed him with ridicule, and a shrill shout of derision rose from all the critics. Already, for some time past, a few writers had risen to protest against the Classical school. They spoke with fiery eloquence of the rights of humanity, the benefits of liberty, the independence of thought, the true principles of the Revolution, and found numerous readers. They fought against rigid laws in the intellectual as well as the social sphere; they pointed out that there were other worlds besides that of antiquity, and that even the latter was not peopled exclusively by cold statues; they delighted in describing the great and beautiful scenes of Nature, and opened out once more a new and broad horizon to art and poetry. The Spring was awakening; Gros felt that he had outlived himself. Arming himself against the voices of the new era with the fatal heroism of the deaf, he became the martyr of Classicism in French art. He was a Classic by education, a Romantic by temperament; a man who took his greatest pride in giving the lie as a teacher to the work he had accomplished as an artist, and this discordance was his ruin. On the 25th of June 1835, being sixty-four years of age, he took up his hat and stick, left his house without a word to any one, and laid himself face-downwards in a tributary of the Seine near Meudon. It was a shallow place, scarce three feet deep, which a child could easily have waded through. It was not till next day, when he had been dead for twenty-four hours, that he was discovered by two sailors walking home along the bank. One of them struck his foot against a black silk hat. In it there was a white cravat marked with the initial G., carefully folded, and upon it a short note to his wife. On a torn visiting-card could still be read the name, Baron Gros. A little farther on they saw the corpse, and as they were afraid to touch a drowned man, they drew lots with straws to decide which of them should pull him out. "I feel it within me, it is a misfortune for me to be alone. One begins to be disgusted with one's self, and then all is over," he had once in his youth written to his mother with gloomy foreboding. Such was the end of a master every fibre of whose being was in revolt against Classicism, and who had so great a love for colour, truth, and life. [Illustration: _L'Art._ ANTOINE JEAN, BARON GROS.]