dead-set he makes at improvisation. 'Tis the contrast perhaps between the
staid Dutch genius and the petulant, sparkling French temper of this new
era, into which he has thrown himself. Alas! it is already apparent that
the result also loses something of longevity, of durability--the colours
fading or changing, from the first, somewhat rapidly, as Jean-Baptiste
notes. 'Tis true, a mere trifle alters or produces the expression. But
then, on the other hand, in pictures the whole effect of which lies in a
kind of harmony, the treachery of a single colour must needs involve the
failure of the whole to outlast the fleeting grace of those social
conjunctions it is meant to perpetuate. This is what has happened, in part,
to that portrait on the easel. Meantime, he has commanded Jean-Baptiste to
finish it; and so it must be.


October 1717.

Antony Watteau is an excellent judge of literature, and I have been
reading (with infinite surprise!) in my afternoon walks in the little
wood here, a new book he left behind him--a great favourite of his; as
it has been a favourite with large numbers in Paris.* Those pathetic
shocks of fortune, those sudden alternations of pleasure and remorse,
which must always lie among the very conditions of an irregular and
guilty love, as in sinful games of chance:--they have begun to talk of
these things in Paris, to amuse themselves with the spectacle of them,
set forth here, in the story of poor Manon Lescaut--for whom fidelity is
impossible, vulgarly eager for the money which can buy pleasures, such
as hers--with an art like Watteau's own, for lightness and grace.
Incapacity of truth, yet with such tenderness, such a gift of tears, on
the one side: on the other, a faith so absolute as to give to an illicit
love almost the regularity of marriage! And this is the book those fine