and sparkling jewels, with its breath of intoxicating perfumes floating from naked shoulders and arms and half-veiled voluptuous bosoms; while the green, sphinx-like eye of Napoleon III rests indifferently on the alabaster sea of white shoulders bowing before him, as he reviews all that he has possessed and all that he can yet enjoy. Dumas' _Dame aux Camélias_, _Diane de Lys_ and _Le Demi-monde_, Barrière's _Filles de Marbre_, Augier's _Mariage d'Olympe_, give the impress of the period upon literature, and the single phrase "The Lady of the Camelias" conjures up a world of forms and of scenery. _La Nouvelle Babylone_ is the title of the fine book in which Joseph Pelletan depicted the mysterious Paris of those years, the great city which cherished in its bosom the lowest and highest extremes of a refined world of pleasure, and was at the same time an inexhaustible fountain of arduous work. One would have imagined that these new conditions of Imperial France would have left their impress, in some way or other, upon the art of painting also; just as in the works of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Terborg, Ostade, Pieter de Hooch, and Van der Meer of Delft the entire seventeenth century is reflected, clearly and with animation, treated with charming familiarity or else with grandiose effect, in its spirit, its manner of feeling, its habits and costumes. What a domain painting would have had; from the official festivals and the bustle of public life down to the complete delineation of the family home! Literature had entered into this course a quarter of a century before, and had shown the path--a path leading to new worlds. But in French art French society is not reflected. Not a single painter has left us a picture of this splendid Paris, dancing on a volcano and yet so amiably delightful. Classicism and historical painting still held the field, as if turned to stone, and show, in essentials, hardly any modification. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ ALEXANDRE CABANEL.]