group of women strongly differentiated as to types and ages are
enjoying over a table their tea and a choice morsel of scandal. The
situation is seized; it is a picture that appeals. Ghastly is his
portrait of a wretched young woman ravaged by absinthe. Her lips are
blistered by the wormwood, and in her fevered glance there is despair.
Another delineation of disease, a grinning, skull-like head with a
scythe back of it, is a tribute to the artist's power of rendering the
repulsive. His Messalina, Lassatta, La Femme au Cochon, and La Femme
au Pantin should be studied. He has painted scissors grinders, flower
girls, "old guards," incantations, fishing parties, the rabble in the
streets, broom-riding witches, apes, ivory and peacocks, and a notable
figure piece, An Interment in the Walloon Country, which would have
pleased Courbet.

It is in his incarnations of Satan that Rops is unapproachable. Satan
Sowing the Tares of Evil is a sublime conception, truly Miltonic. The
bony-legged demon strides across Paris. One foot is posed on Notre
Dame. He quite touches the sky. Upon his head is a broad-brimmed
peasant's hat, Quaker in shape. Hair streams over his skeleton
shoulders. His eyes are gleaming with infernal malice--it is the most
diabolic face ever drawn of his majesty; not even Franz Stuck's Satan
has eyes so full of liquid damnation. Scattering miniature female
figures, like dolls, to the winds, this monster passes over Paris, a
baleful typhoon. The moral is not far to seek; indeed, there is
generally a moral, sometimes an inverted one, in the Rops etchings.
Order Reigns at Warsaw is a grim commentary on Russian politics quite
opportune to-day. La Peine de Mort has been used by Socialists as a
protest against capital punishment. Les Diables Froids personifies the
impassible artist. It is a page torn from the book of hell. Rops had
read Dante; he knew the meaning of the lines: "As the rill that runs