When we look at his portrait we are unconsciously reminded of certain pictures by the younger Holbein in the Windsor Gallery and in the collection at Bâle; there is the same peculiar combination of refinement and strength scarcely ever met with among his contemporaries, the same sharp, subtle moulding of the features which is only produced in a race of long standing. His head recalls to our memory another, the head of one who is not long dead, more massive perhaps, less developed, more thoughtful, but with an equally calm expression; a head belonging to the same racial type, with the same proud, princely features, the same prominent nose with the large eyes of a discoverer--the head of a Normandy peasant, of Millet, his fellow-countryman, the creator of a new feeling for nature and a new aspect of nature in art. The one feature that separates Millet from all other artists, in his drawings far more than in his heavy, dull-coloured paintings, is that he saw his people as one with nature. Where is the difference in Millet’s picture between the flock of ravens alighting on the autumnal field in the midst of the grey eternity of a damp day, and the man and woman who, with rake and spade stuck in the ground beside them, stand praying at the sound of the Angelus in a position which is of itself a silent devotion at the approach of darkness? Just as the forms of the flying ravens break the great self-sufficiency of the landscape and thereby attract attention to it, so the powerful simple outlines of the man and woman are only a more emphatic expression of the solemn silence which the evening casts over the land. Just as Millet places his people in the landscape, as an inseparable part of nature, one with her, so Barbey D’Aurevilly places his characters on the great, lonely sea-coast, on the yellow sands and the long, flat, green meadows of storm-bound Normandy. The outlines here are the same as there, standing out great and simple in their solemnity, silent and weird as fate against the great, simple, peaceful landscape. In the same way that Millet’s women stand firm and immoveable as a mountain against the everlasting heavens, so Barbey D’Aurevilly’s defiant yet submissive women stand in relief against the eternal landscape of their native country, with the same powerful simplicity of Millet’s pictures, inflexible as regards strange and transitory laws, but submissive to the laws that appeal to them from the depths of their own natures.