Nevertheless, it would be unjust to speak of Baudry's work as merely faded Classicism, or as Michael Angelo and water. He was not merely a pupil of the Italians; he contributed something Parisian of his own, something pretty, mannered, refined, graceful, seductive, and smiling, and felt himself independent enough to give to his conventional figures this sprightly addition of genuinely modern nervosity. The birth-certificates of his young men were drawn up in Florence, those of his young women in Rome, three hundred and fifty years ago; yet there is in the latter something of the _Parisienne_, in the former something of the modern dandies who know the fevered life of the Boulevards. In his delightful art there is French wit, there is a touch of the piquant, of the feminine, of the ambiguous, which almost amounts to indecency. One can still recognise the charming model in the figures of his dancers and Muses; you can see that Music's or Poetry's waist was laced up in a close-fitting corset before she sat for the picture. One may meet these women at any moment, trailing their dresses along the sidewalks of the Boulevards, or riding negligently in their carriages back from the Bois de Boulogne. And still more modern than the wasp-like form of the body is the character of the face and the smile on the lips. Thus Baudry has given a new shade to the manner in which one can obtain inspiration from the old masters. To all that he borrowed he added a personal and charming note. He possesses an elegance and grace which are neither Correggio's, nor Raphael's, nor Veronese's, but French and Parisian. His Muses and Cupids, his "Comedy" and his "Judgment of Paris," are documents of the French spirit in the nineteenth century, and--together with a few small and fine portraits on a green or blue background _à la_ Clouet, among which that of his friend About takes the first rank--they will always assure him an important place in the history of French art. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BAUDRY. CYBELE. (_By permission of the Marquise Arconati-Visconti, the owner of the picture._) ] [Illustration: BAUDRY. LEDA.]