so.

And then, it was at the desire of M. de Crozat that the thing was
done. One must oblige one's patrons. The lady also, they tell me,
is consumptive, like Antony himself, and like to die. And he, who
has always lacked either the money or the spirits to make that long-
pondered, much-desired journey to Italy, has found in her work the
veritable accent and colour of those old Venetian masters he would so
willingly have studied under the sunshine of their own land. Alas!
How little peace have his great successes given him; how little of
[40] that quietude of mind, without which, methinks, one fails in
true dignity of character.

November 1718.

His thirst for change of place has actually driven him to England,
that veritable home of the consumptive. Ah me! I feel it may be the
finishing stroke. To have run into the native country of
consumption! Strange caprice of that desire to travel, which he has
really indulged so little in his life--of the restlessness which,
they tell me, is itself a symptom of this terrible disease!

January 1720.

As once before, after long silence, a token has reached us, a slight
token that he remembers--an etched plate, one of very few he has
executed, with that old subject: Soldiers on the March. And the
weary soldier himself is returning once more to Valenciennes, on his
way from England to Paris.