By the side of this unrivalled antagonist it is permitted to place Lepautre, twenty years older than Leclerc, but whose studies had been principally on architecture. In the moments that he left his special work he devoted himself to frontispieces and vignettes; nevertheless, although he had before him the charming designs of Leclerc, he confined himself to a cold and hard manner, keeping, besides, as much as possible to titles, in which his particular talent could find scope. He designed also the Chartreux Missal of 1679, the _Gallia Christiana_ after Marot, the _Dioptrique Oculaire_ of P. Chérubin, engraved by Edelinck, and a thousand other works of small repute. [Illustration: Fig. 78.--Small figure of Sébastien Leclerc for Richesource's pamphlet.] Very different was Francis Chauveau, who, without having the delicacy of Sébastien Leclerc or his art of arrangement, treated at least with grace little figures and illustrations. Certainly there is an enormous distance between these correct and commonplace engraved plates and the delightful wood engravings of the time of Geoffroy Tory, for example. But, be their worth what it may, they suited very well; and even with Molière they did not make such a bad figure. Chauveau was associated with many of the works of Leclerc, who caused him often to be less heavy, inasmuch as Leclerc corrected in engraving many of his compositions. It was so with Molière, and still more with Racine in the plate of the _Plaideurs_, in which Chauveau revealed himself a precursor of the eighteenth century. Unhappily he did not always follow this manner. Successively, and with various luck, he illustrated _Alaric_, _Andromaque_, and the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid for Benserade, with Leclerc; the _Pucelle_ of Chapelain, and the _Tragédies_ of Racine, to which Le Brun did not disdain to put his hand. In short, the connecting link between the beginning of the seventeenth and that of the eighteenth century in the development of illustration is Sébastien Leclerc. He had known the artists of the first period; he was to see at his death appear one of the precursors of the vignettists of the following century, Claude Gillot. Thanks to him, overburdened titles and unskilful vignettes underwent a gradual transformation. In the delicacy and tenuity of his designs may be seen the dominant note of the eighteenth century, coquetry, and Choffard is divined. He was nearly the only one who did not fall into the exaggerations of the engravers of the time; he kept beside them without touching them, and preciously preserved his own well-accentuated personality. By the smallness and slenderness of his figures, Leclerc recalls somewhat the school of Fontainebleau; but he is above all the reflection of Callot, a Lorrainer like himself.