tumble-down old place has lost its moss-grown tiles and the green
weather-stains we have known all our lives on the high whitewashed wall,
opposite which we sit, in the little sculptor's yard, for the coolness,
in summertime. Among old Watteau's workpeople came his son, "the genius,"
my father's godson and namesake, a dark-haired youth, whose large, unquiet
eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various drawings which lie exposed
here. My father will have it that he is a genius indeed, and a painter born.
We have had our September Fair in the Grande Place, a wonderful stir of
sound and colour in the wide, open space beneath our windows. And just where
the crowd was busiest young Antony was found, hoisted into one of those
empty niches of the old Hotel de Ville, sketching the scene to the life,
but with a kind of grace--a marvellous tact of omission, as my father
pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own
window--which has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine, seem like
people in some fairyland; or like infinitely clever tragic actors, who, for
the humour of the thing, have put on motley for once, and are able to throw
a world of serious innuendo into their burlesque looks, with a sort of
comedy which shall be but tragedy seen from the other side. He brought his
sketch to our house to-day, and I was present when my father questioned him
and commended his work. But the lad seemed not greatly pleased, and left
untasted the glass of old Malaga which was offered to him. His father will
hear nothing of educating him as a painter. Yet he is not ill-to-do, and has
lately built himself a new stone house, big and grey and cold. Their old
plastered house with the black timbers, in the Rue des Cardinaux, was
prettier; dating from the time of the Spaniards, and one of the oldest in
Valenciennes.


October 1701.