Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/132

 •284 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS poem that tells how, one winter evening, sitting by his fire, the old poet was sur- prised by a sound of weeping outside his door, and opening it, found Cupid wet and shivering and begging for a shelter from the cold. The man takes the pretty, dimpled mischief to his bosom, warms his feet and hands at the fire, dries his bow and arrows, and lets him sip wine from his cup. Then, when Cupid is refreshed and warmed, he tries his arrows, now here, now there, and at last aims one straight at his benefactor's heart, and laughing at the jest, flies out at the open door. G£r6me's picture was in three panels. The first showed the poet opening the door to the sobbing Cupid, with his bedraggled wings and dripping curls ; in the next, the rosy ingrate wounds his benefactor ; in the third, the poet sits disconsolate by his hearth, musing over the days when Love was his guest, if but for an hour. As the story was an old one, so many an artist before Ge"r6me had played with it as a subject for a picture. Jean-Francois Millet himself, an- other pupil of Delaroche, though earlier than G£rome, had tried his hand at illus- trating Anacreon's fable before he found his proper field of work in portraying the occupations of the men and women about him, the peasants among whom he was born and bred. Gdr6me's picture did nothing to advance his fortunes with the public. 1848 was a stormy time in France and in all Europe, and people were not in the mood to be amused with such trifles as Anacreon and his Cupid. The pictures in that year's Salon that drew the public in crowds about them were Couture's " The Romans of the Decline of the Empire," in which all Paris saw, or thought it saw, the handwriting-on-the-wall for the government of Louis-Philippe ; and the " Shipwrecked Sailors in a Bark," of Delacroix, a wild and stormy scene of ter- ror that seemed to echo the prophecies of evil days at hand for France with which the time was rife. Gerdme's next picture, however, was to bring him once more before the pub- lic, and to carry his name beyond his native France even as far as America. Leaving for the nonce his chosen field of antiquity, where yet he was to distin- guish himself, he looked for a subject in the Paris of his own - day. " The Duel after the Masquerade " opens for us a corner of the Bois de Boulogne — the fashionable park on the outskirts of Paris — where in the still dawn of a winter's day, a group of men are met to witness a duel between two of their companions who have quarrelled at a masked ball. The ground is covered with a light fall of snow ; the bare branches of the trees weave their network across the gray sky, and in the distance we see the carriages that have brought the disputants to the rield. The duel is over. One of the men, dressed in the costume of Pierrot, the loose white trousers and slippers, the baggy white shirt, and white skull-cap, falls, mortally wounded, into the arms of his second : the pallor of coming death masked by the white-painted face. The other combatant, a Mohawk Indian (once a staple character at every masked-ball in Paris : curious survival of the popularity of Cooper's novels), is led wounded off the field by a friend dressed as Harlequin. Gerome in this striking picture showed for the first time that tal- ent as a story-teller to which he is so largely indebted for his reputation. What-