To-day the scene has greatly changed; the artists in Rome live poor and in retirement. Perhaps this life contains a poetry which is as good as the first. A society of German painters[584] has set itself to carry painting back to Perugino[585], in order to restore to it its Christian inspiration. Those young neophytes of St. Luke[586] maintain that Raphael, in his second manner, became a pagan and that his talent degenerated. Be it so; let us be pagans like the Raphaelite Virgins; let our talent degenerate and grow enfeebled as in the picture of the _Transfiguration!_ This creditable error of the new sacred school is none the less an error; it would follow that the stiffness and bad drawing of the forms would be a proof of intuitive vision, whereas that expression of faith which we observe in the works of the painters who precede the Renascence comes from the fact, not that the figures are posed squarely and motionless as sphinxes but that painting believed as did its century. It is the thought, not the painting, of the century that is religious; so true is this, that the Spanish School is eminently pious in its expression, notwithstanding that it has the grace and movement of the painting subsequent to the Renascence. Whence does this come? From the fact that _the Spaniards are Christians._ I go to see the artists separately at work; the pupil sculptor lives in some grotto, under the evergreen oaks of the Villa Medici, where he finishes his marble child giving a serpent to drink out of a shell. The painter inhabits a dilapidated house in some deserted spot; I find him alone, taking through his open window some view of the Roman Campagna. M. Schnetz's[587] _Brigand's Wife_ has become the mother asking of the Madonna the cure of her son. Léopold Robert[588], returning from Naples, passed through Rome recently, bringing with him the enchanted scenes of that lovely clime, which he has simply stuck on to his canvas. [Sidenote: Guérin, Horace Vernet, Quecq.] Guérin has retired, like a sick dove, to the top of a pavilion of the Villa Medici. He listens, with his head under his wing, to the sound of the wind from the Tiber; when he wakes up, he makes a pen-drawing of the Death of Priam. Horace Vernet[589] is struggling to change his manner: will he succeed? The snake which he twines round his neck, the dress which he affects, the cigar which he smokes, the masks and foils with which he surrounds himself remind one too much of the bivouac. Who has ever heard speak of my friend M. Quecq[590], the successor of Julius III.[591] in the cabin of Michael Angelo, Vignola[592] and Taddeo Zuccaro[593]? And yet he painted the _Death of Vitellius_ none too badly, in his nymphic grotto seized under distress. The waste garden-plots are haunted by a crafty animal which M. Quecq occupies himself in hunting: it is a fox, the great-grandson of Reynard the Fox, first of the name, and nephew of Ysengrin the Wolf.