Among the younger generation, _Rochegrosse_, an artist of daring genius, appeared for a while to have taken to such themes by free choice, and not solely through the traditions of the studio. One seemed to observe in his works a truly emotional temperament flaming behind the trammels of conventionality, and was almost inclined to rank him among the spirits of storm and stress who trace their descent from Delacroix. After his first picture, in which "Vitellius" is represented dragged through the streets of Rome and ill treated by the populace, he achieved success with a scene taken from the destruction of Troy. Here "Andromache," raging with impotent anguish, is struggling against a number of Greeks who have snatched her child from her arms to throw it down from the ramparts. This brutal strife is depicted with the highest naturalistic power. Neither the heroine nor the warriors belong to the ideal figures of the style of compromise. Andromache is of a fulness of form almost approaching corpulence, and the Greeks remind one of Indians on the warpath. Mangled corpses complete the picture, and on the bare wall to the left, over the stairs, hang dead bodies abandoned to corruption and the birds of prey. In his third picture he took for his theme the horrors of the barbarous and ferocious Peasants' War in the fourteenth century, as Mérimée had described them in his book entitled _La Jacquerie_; and his work is all the more effective as there lurks in the subject a certain grim modern touch which reminds one of the Social Democracy, of the insurrection of the Commune, of something which might happen even to-day. The insurgents break into the hall, where the ladies of the castle have taken refuge with their children. One alone stands erect, the grandmother in her nun-like widow's dress, and stretches her arms behind her with a gesture of energy, as if to shield the younger ones at her back. The foremost intruder ironically takes off his cap. Another lifts up on his pike the fair-haired, bleeding head of the lord of the castle; a third has similarly transfixed his reeking heart. Others are pressing in from without, breaking the window panes with their weapons, which are yet dripping with blood. Beneath frightful figures are seen, the most horrible that of a woman standing on the window-sill, her hands propped upon her knees, gazing with insane laughter upon the mortal terror of the aristocratic ladies. [Illustration: _Baschet._ LAURENS. THE INTERDICT.]