their owners lived, the ballets in which the farthingales of all those
beautiful pink ladies whirled around, and the sword-thrusts which those
noblemen gave each other with their rapiers? Here are some temptations
of history. One would like to know whether those people loved as we do,
and what difference existed between their passions and our own. One
would like them to open their lips and tell their history, tell us
everything they used to do, no matter how futile, and what their cares
and pleasures used to be. It is an irritating and seductive curiosity, a
dreamy desire for knowledge, such as one feels regarding the past life
of a mistress.... But they are deaf to the questions our eyes put to
them, they remain dumb and motionless in their wooden frames, and we
pass on. The moths attack their canvases, but the latter are
revarnished; and the pictures will smile on when we are buried and
forgotten. And others will come and gaze upon them, till the day they
crumble to dust; then people will dream in the same old way before our
own likenesses, and ask themselves what used to happen in our day, and
whether life was not more alluring then.

I should not have spoken again of those handsome dames, if the large,
full-length portrait of Madame Deshoulières, in an elaborate white
_dêshabille_, (it was really a fine picture, and, like the much decried
and seldom read efforts of the poetess, better at the second look than
at the first), had not reminded me, by the expression of the mouth,
which is large, full, and sensual, of the peculiar coarseness of Madame
de Staël's portrait by Gérard. When I saw it two years ago, at Coppet,
in bright sunshine, I could not help being impressed by those red,
vinous lips and the wide, aspiring nostrils. George Sand's face offers a
similar peculiarity. In all those women who were half masculine,
spirituality revealed itself only in the eyes. All the rest remained
material.