The noble gentleman, a painter in right of the Revolution, began that generation of artists who dress themselves up like sketches, grotesques, caricatures. Some wear prodigious mustachioes: one would think they were going to conquer the world; their brushes are halberds, their erasing-knives sabres: others have huge beards, and hanging or puffed-out hair; they smoke a cigar by way of vulcano. These "cousins of the rainbow," as our old Régnier[677] says, have their heads filled with deluges, seas, rivers, forests, cataracts, tempests, or else with carnages, executions and scaffolds. In their rooms they have human skulls, foils, mandolines, morions, and dolmans. Bragging, pushing, uncivil, liberal (as far as the portrait of the tyrant whom they are painting), they endeavour to form a separate species between the ape and the satyr; they are anxious to make it understood that the secrecy of the studio has its dangers, and that there is no safety for the models. But how handsomely do they not redeem these oddities by a fevered existence, a suffering and sensitive nature, an entire abnegation of self, an incalculable devotion to the miseries of others, a delicate, superior, idealized manner of feeling, a poverty proudly welcomed and nobly endured; lastly, sometimes by immortal talents: the offspring of work, passion, genius, and solitude! Leaving Geneva at night to return to Lyons, we were stopped at the foot of the Fort de l'Écluse, waiting for the gates to be opened. During this stay of the witches in _Macbeth_ on the heath, strange things passed within me. My dead years came to life again and surrounded me like a band of phantoms; my burning seasons returned to me in their flame and sadness. My life, hollowed out by the death of Madame de Beaumont, had remained empty: airy forms, houris or dreams, issuing from that abyss, took me by the hand and led me back to the days of the sylph. I was no longer in the spot which I occupied, I dreamed of other shores. Some secret influence urged me to the regions of the Dawn, whither I was drawn besides by the plan of my new work and the religious voice which released me from the vow of the village woman, my foster-mother. As all my faculties had extended, as I had never misused life, it superabounded with the pith of my intelligence, and art, triumphing in my nature, added to the poet's inspirations. I had what the Fathers of the Thebaïde called "ascensions" of the heart. Raphael--forgive the blasphemy of the simile--Raphael, before the Transfiguration only sketched upon the easel, could not have been more electrified by his master-piece than was I by Eudore and Cymodocée, whose names I did not yet know and whose images I dimly saw through an atmosphere of love and fame.