for doors and the like, now in fashion) who is also concierge of the
Palace of the Luxembourg. Antony is actually lodged somewhere in
that grand place, which contains the king's collection of the Italian
pictures he would so willingly copy. Its gardens also are
magnificent, with something, as we understand from him, altogether of
a novel kind in their disposition and embellishment. Ah! how I
delight myself, in fancy at least, in those beautiful gardens, freer
and trimmed less stiff than those of other royal houses. Methinks I
see him there, when his long summer-day's work is over, enjoying the
cool shade of the stately, broad-foliaged trees, each of which is a
great courtier, though it has its way almost as if it belonged to
that open and unbuilt country beyond, over which the sun is sinking.

His thoughts, however, in the midst of all this, are not wholly away
from home, if I may judge by the subject of a picture he hopes to
sell for as much as sixty livres--Un Depart de Troupes, Soldiers
Departing--one of those scenes of military life one can study so well
here at Valenciennes.

[11]

June 1705.

Young Watteau has returned home--proof, with a character so
independent as his, that things have gone well with him; and (it is
agreed!) stays with us, instead of in the stone-mason's house. The
old people suppose he comes to us for the sake of my father's
instruction. French people as we are become, we are still old
Flemish, if not at heart, yet on the surface. Even in French
Flanders, at Douai and Saint Omer, as I understand, in the churches