The scene of the picture is a garden of Damvillers painted exactly from nature, with its grey soil, its apple and pear-trees clothed with small leaves, its vegetable beds, and its flowers growing wild. Joan herself is a pious, careworn, dreamy country girl. Every Sunday she has been to church, lost herself in long mystic reveries before the old sacred pictures, heard the misery of France spoken of; and the painted statues of the parish church and its tutelary saints pursue her thoughts. And just to-day, as she sat winding yarn in the shadow of the apple-trees, murmuring a prayer, she heard of a sudden the heavenly voices speaking. The spirits of St. Michael, St. Margaret, and St. Catharine, before whose statues she has prayed so often, have freed themselves from the wooden images and float as light phantoms, as pallid shapes of mist, which will as suddenly vanish into air before the eyes of the dreaming girl. Joan rises trembling, throwing her stool over, and steps forward. She stands in motionless ecstasy stretching out her left arm, and gazing into vacancy with her pupils morbidly dilated. Of all human phases of expression which painting can approach, such mystical delirium is perhaps the hardest to render; and probably it was only by the aid of hypnotism, to which the attention of the painter was directed just then by the experiments of Charcot, that Bastien-Lepage was enabled to produce in his model that look of religious rapture, oblivious to the whole world, which is expressed in the vague glance of her eyes, blue as the sea. [Illustration: _Baschet._ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE POND AT DAMVILLERS.] "Joan of Arc" was succeeded by "The Beggar," that life-size figure of the haggard old tramp who, with a thick stick under his arm--of which he would make use upon any suitable occasion--picks up what he can in the villages, saying a paternoster before the doors while he begs. This time he has been ringing at the porch of an ordinary middle-class dwelling, and he is sulkily thrusting into the wallet slung round his shoulders a great hunch of bread which a little girl has just given to him. There is a mixture of spite and contempt in his eyes as he shuffles off in his heavy wooden shoes. And behind the doorpost the little girl, who, in her pretty blue frock, has such a trim air of wearing her Sunday best, looks rather alarmed and glances timidly at the mysterious old man. "Un brave Homme," or "Le Père Jacques," as the master afterwards called the picture, was to some extent a pendant to "The Beggar." He comes out of the wood wheezing, with a pointed cap upon his head and a heavy bundle of wood upon his shoulders, whilst at his side his little grandchild is plucking the last flowers. It is November; the leaves have turned yellow and cover the ground. Père Jacques is providing against the Winter. And the Winter is drawing near--death. [Illustration: _Baschet._ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE HAYMAKER.] [Illustration: _Mansell Photo._