Madame Octave Feuillet, to whom I went for final confirmation of this supposed dearth of artistic documents relating to her deceased husband, showed me everything she had as mementoes of the delicate psychologist to whose success she so largely contributed by her feminine diplomacy, her social observations, and her subtle and very cultivated mind. "Alas!" she said, "I do not know why I am not richer in pictures of my dear lost one, for he had endless opportunities of being painted, but he was always too nervous and too busy to undertake the sittings proposed by various artists. This is why I can only show you a little portrait painted by Bonvin just before 1850, which represents him with a Musset-like face, and agrees pretty closely with a drawing of the same period by the engraver Monciau, which could easily be reproduced." [Illustration: OCTAVE FEUILLET After a photograph taken in 1880] "Beyond these souvenirs of Octave Feuillet as a young man," continued his widow, "I have nothing but a drawing by Dantan, made at the time of the great success of the _Sphinx_ at the Comedie Française, that is to say, about ten years before his death, and a large canvas by Hirch, a full-length, painted after 1880. But isn’t it too dark for reproduction?" To these portraits of the author of "Julia de Trécoeur" we may add a number of photographs, all of them taken after 1860. First, the large full-length portrait published by Goupil about 1869 in the "Galerie Contemporaine." In spite of the defects inherent in all photographs, this is the most like him of all his portraits: it is reproduced as the frontispiece of this volume. We have given several others, among them one from Monciau’s drawing, which shows us an Octave Feuillet of thirty-five, who is nevertheless somewhat morose-looking, and various presentments of the quinquagenarian Academician, with the white hair and grey beard of a man still in his prime, which offer a much nobler and more attractive semblance of the writer who has been called "The family Musset." [Illustration: OCTAVE FEUILLET The last photograph taken in 1889] After the death of the famous novelist and playwright, the sculptor Crauck executed a fine bust of him with the aid of instructions given him by one of the author’s sons, Richard Feuillet. Another bust, of little interest and a poor likeness, is at the Hôtel de Ville of St. Lo, where Feuillet was born, and where he often came to rest at his property during the summer. [Illustration: OCTAVE FEUILLET Sketch by Dantan, about 1878]