press the harmony which lies under all manifestations of life; who loves "everything: the arts, music, painting, books, society, dress, luxury, excitement, calm, laughter, sadness, melancholy, chaff (blague), love, cold. sunlight; all the seasons, all states of the atmosphere, the calm plains of Russia and the mountains round Naples; the snow in winter, the rains in autumn, springtime and its follies, the quiet days of sunimer, and the lovely nights, with their brilliant stars . . . 1 admire and worship everything. Everything presents itself before me under aspects interesting or sublime. I should like to see all, to have all, to embrace all. to confound myself with all, and die, since it must be so, in two or in thirty years; to die with ecstasy at the thought of experiencing this last mystery, this end of everything, or this divine beginning." These were the dispositions which insured Marie success in all the subjects she touched; whether it was the picture of a nodel, composed with a brutal veracity which astonished Julian himself, or a flowering orchard in the first blush of springtime; a street waif under a torn umbrella. or her lovely cousin in muslin and lace; little workhouse boys trudging to school, or autumnal mist aud glowing leaves on the Seine. 'The things are surprises," she на уя are like windows opened ou to the lives of people. . . . It is an intense palpitating interest. But. the fools think that to be 'modern' or 'realistic,' it is sufficient to paint the first thing that comes, without arranging it. Do not arrange, but choose and surprise,-everything lies there. The choice makes the artist." Again and again she reiterates this truth as to the essence of realism. And just as her realism was that of a poetical and enthusiastic nature, so the freedom in which we have seen her rejoicing was not more than that measure of emancipation which an attractive young woman of society could enjoy without exciting a storm of criticism. She was no believer in that "stupid equality of the sexes, which is a mere Utopia," but earnestly desired an equality of education, which would destroy all inequality except that occasioned by nature itself. "A woman who prowls about (qui rôde) is an imprudence," she remarks with her usual good sense; yet she feels very deeply the stunting influence of that restraint which prevents her prowling. "You want to go, in Rome, to see the ruins.' "Where are you going, Marie?' "Bnt you have seen it already! Let us go to the theatre or the proшAnd enade, it will be crowded. that's enough to make one's wings fall.'" "Ah, how wonien are to be pitied! nien are free at least. Absolute independence in ordinary life, liberty to go and come. to go ont. to dine at the restaurant or at home, to go on foot to the Bois or the café, that liberty is half the talent. and three-quarters of everyday happiness. But, you will say, why do not you, a superior woman, take this liberty? Impossible, for the woman who emancipates herself thus, the young and pretty wonian, of course, is almost pnt on the index; she becomes singular, remarked, blanied (toquéc), and consequently still less free thun in not shocking those idiotic usages." Her ideas on the equality of the sexes were those of a clear-minded woman of the world, intensely impatient of control, but at the same time too clear-sighted to deceive herself in any way on the subject; her views on the subject of equality in society were those of an aristocratic mind which reason has led into republicanism. She de tests that form of equality which is obtained by levelling down, and with sound moral sense justly falls foul of George Sand in this respect. "How can one read three hundred pages filled with the doings and words of Valentine and Bénédict, accompanied by an uncle or a gardener ?" she remarks in disgust. "We have everlastingly social levelling by means of love-an ignoble thing. Let equality be established-that is as it should be; but let it not be due to caprices of sex. The countess in love with her valet, and dissertations thereupon!" To return, however, to Marie's active life. A month after her entry into the studio saw her adding anatomy to her other work, and handling human bones and skulls in a way which must have appeared disgusting to her family. To this and painting, with which, to the great astonishment of her fellow-students, she was advised to occupy her spare time, after two months' work, she quickly added sculpture. "I am going to sculpt in the evenings," she says,.. "so as not to think that I am young and that the time is passing,-that I am bored (m'ennuie), that I rebel-that it is horrible." For whatever reason it was begun, sculpture soon inflamed her as much as painting. The fervid descriptions of her conception of one of her last pictures, and of her sketch of her first statue, are well worth quotation, as showing the glowing passion with which she worked. "To cut short these indecisions, I am going to paint the mist on the Seine in a boat. That will do me good. I get up at one o'clock in the morning to say that I want to paint something! It was because I felt inclined to do nothing that I suffered. It is like a flame which mounts and "But this evening, this evening, the joy is immense. 'What!' you will Bastien?' No, but I have made the say, has Saint Marceaux come, or my life sketched two whole figures, model of my statue. . . I have in finished,... because, working alone, and two or three busts, all left half and without guidance, I could attach myself to nothing which interested me, into which I could put life, soul, To conceive a figure, and have an -something, in fact, not a mere study. immense desire to execute it—voilà! It will be badly done. But what then? I was born a sculptor; I adore form. Colour can never give as much power as form, although I am mad for colour. But form! A beautiful movement, a beautiful attitude; you it keeps the same significance. What go round it, the profile changes, while happiness! what ravishment! My figure is that of a woman upright, weeping, her head in her hands. You know that movement of the shoulders when one is crying. I should have liked to kneel before it. I said a thousand follies to it. . . . The model is thirty centimetres high, but it will be life-size.... At last I tore up a fine fragile statuette. I love this clay more cambric shirt to wrap round this little than my own skin. . . . It is so lovely, the white damp linen covering and draping with graceful folds this supple body, which I see as it should be. I have wrapped it round respectfully; it is fine, delicate, noble," All this while, unhappily, Marie's presentiments of an early death were rapidly nearing fulfilment. "I cannot live," she says near the beginning of the second volume. "I am not created regularly; I have a heap of things too many, then a heap of things which are wanting, and a character which cannot last... No one could be more fantastic, more ex acting, more impatient. Sometines, or perhaps always, there is a certaiu foun lation of calm; but I do not explain myself well, I only tell you that my life cannot last." She judged but too well. Painting, drawing, sculpture, visits to Versailles, society, the theatres, night watchings, united to the exaggerated sensibility of an intensely nervous nature in an uncongenial milien, were not calculated to diminish the evil which, as we have said, existed already before she settled at Paris. To the cough, to the trouble with the eyes, was added a slight deafness, which threatened to increase, and which intensely wounded Marie's amour propre, galled her sense of independence, and unspeakably in creased the bitterness with which she regarded her life. "I am tormented with the most refined cruelty," she says in one place; and in another, "It is as though God said, 'You have managed to console yourself for the loss of your voice? Well, now you shall lose your hearing too.'" Later we find her at a German wateringplace amusing every one by her antics, and quietly remarking, "I assure you it is sad to make twenty-five persons die with laughing, and yet not to enjoy one's self," On a journey through Spain with her family, she is now "drunk with blood" after that "school for assassius," the bull-fight; now cutting her melon as though she were "planting a banderilla; now painting a convict, with the officers of the prison arranged in admiring semicircles behind her, and the rest of the convicts craning their necks to see at least the easel from the yard below; now fuming at the very few ideas she is able to exchange with her companions. "To travel with one's family!" she exclaims,-"it is as though one found pleasure in waltzing with one's aunt." But neither bathing nor travelling could stop the evil. Soon after her return to Paris, she went alone and in secret to a strange doctor, in order to learn the truth. Her manuer of facing it is most characteristic. "Tiens it amuses me,. this position of a condemned being. It is a pose, an emotion; I contain a mystery; death has touched ine with his fingers; there is a certain charın in it; it is uew at first." Blisters, iodine. care, she refused them all; she would not disfigure herself; she would work on and taste the full of life till the very end. Most touching are the last few months of the existence of the attainted girl, the continued fever of life and work; the indomitable will with which she continued the struggle for glory; the despair with which she realises that the blow will fall before she can fairly reach her goal. Six years working ten hours a-day to reach what? A beginning of talent and a mortal illness." Touching is her battle. with her idyllic sympathy for Bastien Lepage. "How can one love when one sees human nature under a microscope?" she asks. Her visits to the great painter in his mortal illness, when she herself could scarcely dress to go to him; her bitter, numbed wretchedness, heartrending in such a nature, at the thought that his death may precede her own; lastly, the breaking of even that proud will, and the scene with which this paper opened, all these should be read in Marie's own words in order to taste their full pathos. That year (1884) her pictures (one of them "Les trois rires!") appeared in the Salon knotted with black crape. Their painter had gone over to the great majority. These works, which displayed to the full her rare vigour of handling and fearless realism, were ultimately bought by the French Government, and hang in the Luxembourg. If Marie could have lived to attain this honour, how intensely glad it would have made her! but in her case, as in that of many an even less fortunate genius, renown came too late to warm the heart that so yearned for it. And may we also add that in her case love also came too late? It is hard to determine whether the deep sympathy she felt for her fellów - sufferer and fellow - artist was love or merely friendship; whether the intellectual sympathy that existed between them had ripened into something warmer; whether, had she lived, Marie could have conquered her ingrained aristocracy of nature, and condescended to be the wife of a man of peasant birth. Be that as it may, no one can lay down without emotion the pages of this diary, in which a human soul has voluntarily laid its very inmost fibres bare before She was not a faultless heroine, far from it, but we love her us. none the less for that. The more, perhaps, for it approaches her to our common humanity. And think of her what we will, we cannot refuse to her the tribute that she was a valiant soul, who acted up to the motto she herself had chosen, "Jusqu'au bout." Our last quotation from these pages shall be one which most delicately indicates her analytical refinement with the blend of uncompromising realism, and is admirably characteristic: mire above all else. "I should like to sing what I adI admire people who eat, in big mouthfuls, mutton-chops composed of fat and blood. I admire those happy persons who swallow raspberries with pleasure, without troubling themselves about the almost inevitable little worms which one always finds in them. I turn them all over, so that the trouble is greater than the pleasure. I also admire all those who can eat all sorts of things, hashed or stuffed, of which they don't know the composition. I admire, . . . or rather, I envy, simple healthy natures who live according to habit. HELEN ZIMMERN. A RIDE WITH A Iɩ was a dull inanspicious morning when I stopped, at 10.38 A.M., ou the foot-plate of one of the Midland new single driving wheel express engines, which had the moment before lazily backed down on to the train of eight carriages, weighing as nearly as possible 105 tous, or with engine and tender 180 tons. Having established my bout fides to the satisfaction of the driver, I made a rapid survey of the surroundings. The fire-box front bristled with bright an ture, and contrasted strangely with the simple trial and watergango taps used a few years ago. Everything was perplexity to the stranger, and yet, when understood, of the simplest character. Injector aud automatic brake apparatus all in oue to the right, and injector and sanding tap to the left; handles and pipes highly polished and severely neat, showing in their application the wisest econony of space. Further speculation as to use and service were abruptly cut short by the shrill whistle of the leading guard, in response to a little pantomimic play from the other end of the train. The craned head of the fireman was quickly withdrawu, and "Right away, inate," followed by a touch of the whistle, and the almost simultaneous opening of the regulator valve. A moment's hesitation, only a moment, and we set off on our journey of 124 iniles, to be run without a stop, as the long finger of the giant clock of St Pancras pointed to forty minutes past ten. We were punctual. The movement was slow and dignified, and reminded one of an athlete doing A a little proliuinary pacius. surden whiri of the driving-wheels, rapidly checked by ensing of steam, aur followel by the application of the stealu saulers, gave me a forcible intimation of the difference between four-wheeled coupler engines and our najestic praucing ster for the day. Immediately the niad whirl was checked, and the onward slow and steady pace was resumed, now slightly quickening, and realised more from the ear, by the rapidly increasing beats, which alone indicated the work being done. Past the towering gasometers to the right, then over the disinal old St Pancras graveyard, shorn of its picturesqueness by the serrated grave-stones, which seem to appeal in speechless rows, and refuse to be hidden by the slight screen of limes and poplars. Bearing down more rapidly by the goods depot with increasing speed, we enter the dark arches which precede Cainden Road, through which we run smartly, and pass Kentish Town station at 30 miles per hour. The real business of the day commences, and the huge ret symmetrical engine, seuticut-like, seems to borrow something of the earnestness of the men in charge. Over crossings, threading with ease what appeared to be a devious and intricate way, through the many sidings at Kentish Town, the foot-plate ineanwhile as steady as the floor of the saloon carriage, told well for the almost perfect balancing of the moving parts. Through another open space, with a gleam of sunlight in the face, quickly exchanged for the uninviting stone-work of the cut |