Shortly afterwards _Camille Roqueplan_ began to alter his manner. Up to that time he had been exclusively a painter who, like Watteau and Terborg, listened with a voluptuous shudder to the piquant rustle of silk, velvet, and satin dresses; now he devoted himself to depicting with perspicuity various scenes from history, renounced his airy and radiant fantasies, and became, in his "Scene from the Massacre of St. Bartholomew," nothing but a tedious schoolmaster. _Nicolaus Robert Fleury_, the painter of "Charles V in the Monastery of St. Just," of the "Massacre of St. Bartholomew," of the "Religious Conference at Poissy," and of other historical anecdotes, carefully conceived and laboriously executed, devoted himself, like Lessing, to the propagation of noble ideas. His pictures were manifestoes against religious fanaticism, and philanthropic discussions concerning the trials and persecutions of the freethinkers. In order to give them the stamp of historical verisimilitude, he buried himself with the zeal of an archivist in the study of the period to be represented; often directly transferred into his pictures figures from Diepenbeeck or Theodor van Thulden; and having the faculty of seizing in old paintings those tones of colour which belong rather to the epoch than the master, he succeeded in giving his works a certain documentary and archaic character for which, on his first appearance, he obtained ample credit. _Louis Boulanger_, after his "Mazeppa" of 1827, was a famous painter. But the highest success was that attained by Paul Delaroche, inasmuch as he understood better than any other, not only how to cater for the cultured public by the didactic nature and historical accuracy of his pictures, but also how to touch the heart by means of a lachrymose sentimentality.