The feverish disposition which he brought with him into the world was heightened by the acrimonious feuds in which, as a painter, he was forced to engage, and which left great bitterness behind them in his mind. His life and his art were in accord, in as much as both were battles. It is not easy to live when one is always ill; not easy to meet with recognition when one proclaims the exact opposite of that which for a generation past all the world has held to be true. And Delacroix took not a single step to meet his opponents half-way. He did not trouble himself for a single moment to please the public; and therefore the public did not come to him. Controversies such as that which took place over the "Massacre of Chios" continued decade after decade, and the exhibition of each of his pictures was the signal for a battle. "No work of his," writes Thoré, "but called forth deafening howls, curses, and furious controversy. Insults were heaped upon the artist, coarser and more opprobrious than one would be justified in applying to a sharper." At Charenton, where he was born, is the Bedlam of France. Hence the epithet continually hurled at him by the critics, who called him the runaway from Charenton. Until the year 1847 his pictures could without difficulty be excluded from the Salon. He irritated people by his violence, by the abruptness of his compositions, by his arrangement of figures with a view to pathos at the expense of plastic elegance; he displeased by the incompleteness of his works, which were regarded as sketches, not finished paintings. When Louis Philippe ordered a picture from his brush, it was on the express condition that it should be as little a Delacroix as possible. There was general ill-humour among the academicians when, at Thiers' suggestion, he was commissioned to decorate the Palais Bourbon. And Delacroix, ambitious and sensitive as he was, was deeply hurt by every mortification of this kind, and affected by every gust of criticism as by a change of wind. Continually denounced in the newspapers, attacked, wounded, delivered over to the wild beasts, as he called it, he never had a moment of rest--he who, with his irritable temperament and fragile health, needed rest more than any man. It was not until almost all his works were brought together in the Universal Exhibition of 1885 that it became evident how great an artist this Delacroix was, whom his country for forty years had not understood, and to whom the Institute had closed its doors to the last. Yet he was no sooner dead than all with one voice proclaimed him a genius; his smallest drawing is to-day worth its weight in gold, while during his lifetime he seldom got more than two thousand francs for his largest paintings. His sketches, great works in small frames, have for the most part found their way to America. The sale of the pictures he left behind him produced three hundred and sixty thousand francs.