Page:François-Millet.djvu/127

 of The Legion of Honour followed in the next year. This year, however, was darkened by one of the deepest sorrows of his life. His friend and equal, Theodore Rousseau, who had been attacked some months before by paralysis affecting the brain, died in his arms at Barbizon, after terrible sufferings, on the 22nd of December 1867.

In 1868 Millet made a second stay at Vichy, and travelled into Alsace and Switzerland, visiting Bâle, Lucerne, Berne and Zurich. He does not seem to have felt the beauty of the Alps so keenly as Rousseau, who found in them his earliest and his latest inspirations. To the Salon of 1869 he sent, besides The Knitting Lesson and the Woman at a Spinning Wheel, the Pig-Killers, which excited hardly less sarcasm than the Peasants carrying a Calf, or the Man with the Hoe. It is a work of savage realism. All the old brutality of man revives in this struggle of heavy, hoggish