from Bulicame to be portioned out amid the sinful women"; and more
than once he explored the frozen circles of Gehenna. Victor Hugo was
much stirred by the design, Le Pendu, which depicts a man's corpse
swinging under a huge bell in some vast and immemorial, raven-haunted,
decaying tower, whose bizarre and gloomy outlines might have been
created by the brain of a Piranesi. An apocalyptic imagination had
Félicien Rops.




III. MONTICELLI



I

Poor "Fada"! The "innocent," the inoffensive fool--as they christened
that unfortunate man of genius, Adolphe Monticelli, in the dialect of
the South, the slang of Marseilles--where he spent the last sixteen
years of his life. The richest colourist of the nineteenth century,
obsessed by colour, little is known of this Monticelli, even in these
days when an artist's life is subjected to inquisitorial methods. Few
had written of him in English before W.E. Henley and W.C. Brownell. In
France eulogised by Théophile Gautier, in favour at the court, admired
by Diaz, Daubigny, Troyon, and Delacroix, his hopes were cracked by
the catastrophe of the Franco-Prussian war. He escaped to Marseilles,
there to die poor, neglected, half mad. Perhaps he was to blame for
his failures; perhaps his temperament was his fate. Yet to-day his
pictures are sought for as were those of Diaz two decades ago, though