same afternoon. In half an hour, therefore, I was witness of an object
lesson of which the teacher was serenely unconscious. Of my complete
triumph when we left there was no doubt, though one of my friends rather
begged the question by insisting that I had taken an unfair advantage;
and that, as he expressed it, "it was not in the game, in an ordinary
discussion, between gentlemen, concerning minor poets, to drag in
Shakespeare in that manner."

I saw Millet but once after this, when late in the autumn I was
returning to Paris, and went, out of respect, to bid him farewell. He
was already ill, and those who knew him well, already feared for his
life. Not knowing this, it was a shock to learn of his death a few
months after--January 20, 1875. The news came to me in the form of the
ordinary notification and convocation to the funeral, which, in the form
of a _lettre de faire part_, is sent out on the occasion of a death
in France, not only to intimate friends, but to acquaintances.

Determined to pay what honor I could, I went to Barbizon, to find, as
did many others gone for the same sad purpose, that an error in the
notices sent, discovered too late to be rectified, had placed the date
of the funeral a day later than that on which it actually occurred.
Millet rests in the little cemetery at Chailly, across the plain from
Barbizon, near his lifetime friend, Theodore Rousseau, who is buried
there. I will never forget the January day in the village of Barbizon.
Though Millet had little part in the village life, and was known to few,
a sadness, as though the very houses felt that a great man had passed
away, had settled over the place. I sought out a friend who had been
Millet's friend for many years and was with him at the last, and as he
told me of the last sad months, tears fell from his eyes.