Enthusiastically adored by the women in his school of painting, he had found a dear friend in _Marie Baskirtscheff_, the distinguished young Russian girl who had become his pupil just as his fame began to rise. It is charming to see the enthusiasm with which Marie speaks of him in her diary. "_Je peins sur la propre palette du vrai Bastien, avec des couleurs à lui, son pinceau, son atelier, et son frère pour modèle._" And how the others envy her because of it! "_La petite Suédoise voulait toucher à sa palette._" With Marie he sketched his plans for the future, and in the midst of this restless activity he was summoned hence together with her, for she also died young, at the age of twenty-four, just as her pictures began to create a sensation. A touching idyll in her diary tells how the girl learnt, when she was dying of consumption, that young Bastien had also fallen ill, and been given up as hopeless. So long as Marie could go out of doors she went with her mother and her aunt to visit her sick friend; and when she was no longer allowed to leave the house he had himself carried up the steps to her drawing-room by his brother, and there they both sat beside each other in armchairs, and saw the end draw near, merciless and inevitable, the end of their young lives, their talents, their ambition, and their hopes. "At last! Here it is then, the end of all my sufferings! So many efforts, so many wishes, so many plans, so many ---- ----, and then to die at four-and-twenty upon the threshold of them all!" [Illustration: _L'Art._ LÉON L'HERMITTE.] Her last picture was one of six schoolboys, sons of the people, who are standing at a street corner chattering; and it makes a curiously virile impression, when one considers that it was painted by a blond young girl, who slept under dull blue silken bed-curtains, dressed almost entirely in white, was rubbed with perfumes after a walk in hard weather, and wore on her shoulders furs which cost two thousand francs. It hangs in the Luxembourg, and for a long time a lady dressed in mourning used to come there every week and cry before the picture painted by the daughter whom she had lost so early. Marie died on 31st October 1884, and Bastien barely a month afterwards. "The Funeral of a Young Girl," in which he wished to immortalise the funeral of Marie, was his last sketch, his farewell to the world, to the living, alluring, ever splendid nature which he loved so much, grasped and comprehended so intimately, and to the hopes which built up their deceptive castles in the air before his dying gaze. He died before he reached Raphael's age, for he was barely thirty-six. The final collapse came on 10th December 1884, upon a sad, rainy evening, after he had lain several months upon a bed of sickness. His frame was emaciated, and as light as that of a child; his face was shrivelled--the eyes alone had their old brilliancy. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ ROLL. THE WOMAN WITH A BULL.