melancholy which broods so sadly over his pictures. "The Girl with the Cow," the little Fauvette, that child of social misery--misery that lies sorrowful and despairing in the gaze of her eyes--is perhaps the most touching example of his brooding devotion to truth. Her brown dress is torn and dirty, while a grey kerchief borders her famished, sickly face. A waste, disconsolate landscape, with a frozen tree and withered thistles, stretches round like a boundless Nirvana. Above there is a whitish, clear, tremulous sky, making everything paler, more arid and wearily bright; there is no gleam of rich luxuriant tints, but only dry, stinted colours; and not a sound is there in the air, not a scythe driving through the grass, not a cart clattering over the road. There is something overwhelming in this union between man and nature. One thinks of the famous words of Taine: "Man is as little to be divided from the earth as an animal or a plant. Body and soul are influenced in the same way by the environment of nature, and from this influence the destinies of men arise." As an insect draws its entire nature, even its form and colour, from the plant on which it lives, so is the child the natural product of the earth upon which it stands, and all the impulses of its spirit are reflected in the landscape. In 1879 Bastien-Lepage went a step further. In that year appeared "Joan of Arc," his masterpiece in point of spiritual expression. Here he has realised the method of treating historical pictures which floated before him as an idea at the Academy, and has, at the same time, solved a problem which beset him from his youth--the penetration of mysticism and the world of dreams into the reality of life. "The Annunciation to the Shepherds," "In Spring," and "The Spring Song" were merely stages on a course of which he reached the destination in "Joan of Arc." His ideal was "to paint historical themes without reminiscences of the galleries--paint them in the surroundings of the country, with the models that one has at hand, just as if the old drama had taken place yesterday evening." [Illustration: _Baschet._ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE BEGGAR.]