down again, still together, and allowed free play to what was in our
hearts, almost till morning, my sisters weeping much. I know better
how to control myself. In a few days that delightful new life will
have [18] begun for him: and I have made him promise to write often
to us. With how small a part of my whole life shall I be really
living at Valenciennes!

January 1714.

Jean-Philippe Watteau has received a letter from his son to-day. Old
Michelle Watteau, whose sight is failing, though she still works
(half by touch, indeed) at her pillow-lace, was glad to hear me read
the letter aloud more than once. It recounts--how modestly, and
almost as a matter of course!--his late successes. And yet!--does
he, in writing to these old people, purposely underrate his great
good fortune and seeming happiness, not to shock them too much by the
contrast between the delicate enjoyments of the life he now leads
among the wealthy and refined, and that bald existence of theirs in
his old home? A life, agitated, exigent, unsatisfying! That is what
this letter really discloses, below so attractive a surface. As his
gift expands so does that incurable restlessness one supposed but the
humour natural to a promising youth who had still everything to do.
And now the only realised enjoyment he has of all this might seem to
be the thought of the independence it has purchased him, so that he
can escape from one lodging-place to another, just as it may please
him. He has already deserted, somewhat incontinently, more than one
of those [19] fine houses, the liberal air of which he used so
greatly to affect, and which have so readily received him. Has he
failed truly to grasp the fact of his great success and the rewards
that lie before him? At all events, he seems, after all, not greatly