Watteau is still the mason's boy, and deals with that world under a
fascination, of the nature of which he is half-conscious methinks,
puzzled at "the queer trick he possesses," to use his own phrase.
You see him growing ever more and more meagre, as he goes through the
world and its applause. Yet he reaches with wonderful sagacity the
secret of an adjustment of colours, a coiffure, a toilette, setting I
know not what air of real superiority on such things. He will never
overcome his early training; and these light things will possess for
him always a kind of representative or borrowed worth, as
characterising that impossible or forbidden world which the mason's
boy saw through the closed gateways of the enchanted garden. Those
trifling and petty graces, the insignia to him of that nobler world
of aspiration and idea, even now that he is aware, as I conceive, of
their true littleness, bring back to him, by the power of
association, all the old magical exhilaration of his dream--his dream
of a better world than [35] the real one. There, is the formula, as
I apprehend, of his success--of his extraordinary hold on things so
alien from himself. And I think there is more real hilarity in my
brother's fetes champetres--more truth to life, and therefore less
distinction. Yes! the world profits by such reflection of its poor,
coarse self, in one who renders all its caprices from the height of a
Corneille. That is my way of making up to myself for the fact that I
think his days, too, would have been really happier, had he remained
obscure at Valenciennes.

September 1717.

My own poor likeness, begun so long ago, still remains unfinished on
the easel, at his departure from Valenciennes--perhaps for ever;
since the old people departed this life in the hard winter of last