February 1716.

There are good things, attractive things, in life, meant for one and not
for another--not meant perhaps for me; as there are pretty clothes which
are not suitable for every one. I find a certain immobility of disposition
in me, to quicken or interfere with which is like physical pain. He, so
brilliant, petulant, mobile! I am better far beside Jean-Baptiste--in
contact with his quiet, even labour, and manner of being. At first he did
the work to which he had set himself, sullenly; but the mechanical labour
of it has cleared his mind and temper at last, as a sullen day turns quite
clear and fine by imperceptible change. With the earliest dawn he enters
his workroom, the Watteau chamber, where he remains at work all day. The
dark evenings he spends in industrious preparation with the crayon for the
pictures he is to finish during the hours of daylight. His toil is also his
amusement: he goes but rarely into the society whose manners he has to
re-produce. The animals in his pictures, pet animals, are mere toys: he
knows it. But he finishes a large number of works, door-heads, clavecin
cases, and the like. His happiest, his most genial moments, he puts, like
savings of fine gold, into one particular picture (true opus magnum, as he
hopes), The Swing. He has the secret of surprising effects with a certain
pearl-grey silken stuff of his predilection; and it must be confessed that
he paints hands--which a draughtsman, of course, should understand at least
twice as well other people--with surpassing expression.


March 1716.

Is it the depressing result of this labour, of a too exacting labour? I
know not. But at times (it is his one melancholy!) he expresses a strange
apprehension of poverty, of penury and mean surroundings in old age;