NATURE makes merry occasionally, and so does human nature, and Blackstick herself unbends. On Monday, May 2, in the year of our Lord 1904, there was a soft storm of rain followed by sunshine, and all the trees in the Tuileries, and in the gardens, and the woods. round about Paris, came out. They burst into blinding-sweet green and gold; the lilacs followed with their fragrant buds, all the violets and pansies rose from the darkness into light, white pinks began to bloom. Everywhere the streets were garlanded, the people went about carrying posies in honour of the spring. The very funerals going by were great masses of beautiful flowers and wreaths, lovely tall pyres of roses spreading fragrance. The scentless daffodils of England were not so much in vogue, so it seemed, as more fragrant flowers; though to be sure bountiful bunches of blue forget-me-nots and purple pansies were to be bought for a few pence at street corners, where the old sat dispensing the nosegays and the young came to buy and to carry them off.

Blackstick sometimes travels under the name of P. M., with a companion who is not yet twenty thousand years old and who shall be A. M. for the occasion. These wanderers frequent a little hostel in a street whose very stones and doorways seem for P. M. dressed with rosemary; A. M. knows of other delightful places and riverside corners; but with or without sweet herbs to recall the past, it is impossible not to love the present in this merry little oasis of the Rue St. Roch. At either end of the quiet street the stream passes along two great thoroughfares, whence the sounds that reach one, the steady tramp of the horses, the jangle of the omnibus bells, the yelling of motors, the trumpetings of bicyclists, all make a distant chorus which somehow suggests an extra sense of rest to the narrow street where St. Roch and St. Romain unite to give their friendly shelter.

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Copyright, 1904, by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, in the United States of America.

The owner of the hotel, the old friend of many of those who come there, adds a certain character and a personal feeling to the establishment, and to this his guests respond. Not long ago a traveller, after twenty-five years, came (as people did in the Old Testament and in illuminated missals) carrying a silver cup in his bag to commemorate the friendly connection.

P. M. and A. M., looking out from their third-floor windows, can see across to those two big boulevards of which mention has been made. The Tuileries Gardens spread greenly beyond the Rue de Rivoli as far as the distant quais, which are crossed and recrossed by their crowds of tiny figures. Looking to the east they can almost count the very steps of the great church which has remained firm while so many kings and emperors and revolutions have passed their way. There stands St. Roch stately and unmoved from year to year, blessing the infants and the young communicants, and the new-married couples and the mourning cortèges as they each come up in turn. From these upper windows A. M. and P. M. seem to live the very life of the city, not only in its outer aspects, but in its domesticities, as they survey the little street with its varying gleams and humours. Look at the hairdresser opposite on the pavement in front of his shop matching his client's hair in the brighter light of the street, while various friends volubly assist. Look at the pretty, pale washerwoman who comes to her door for a breath; a lady from the hotel itself crosses over in slippers to fetch some snowy garment which has been exquisitely starched and gauffered. Look at the greengrocer's man washing his carrots which flash with colour in the slanting sun rays, while the owner of the shop, sitting on a straw chair with an ink bottle carefully adjusted into a sack of potatoes, is writing his accounts in a book. The people at work, the people at play, are all interested and interesting. They are primitifs in their way no less than their predecessors depicted in the Pavillon de Marsan yonder. The little schoolboys in their capes and pointed hoods, and neat bare legs, as they fly past; the employés and professors as they cross the road with neat rapid strides, the young girls as they pass stepping gaily in time, arm in arm as if they were dancing.

Besides the springtime it is also Confirmation time. The whole town is scattered with little brides of ten and twelve years old, in white veils, white shoes, white sashes, accompanied by the proud parents trudging alongside; the father is generally importantly got up with a large and shining hat and boots to match; the mother

may be stout and weary-footed from some neighbouring outskirt of Paris, but she wears her bonnet with an air, and is usually carrying a basket. Other parents more prosperous, or less provident, go off to the café at the corner of the street and settle themselves at little tables to feast with their children off cakes and ale. The little bride is the centre of the party, or the conscious little boy in his short white trousers and fringed white ribbons. While the holiday makers sit feasting the workers pass by; perhaps it is a man and his dog yoked together to a wooden cart, or a long waggon crawling on carrying trunks of trees from the forest to the woodcutters' yard. Perhaps a motor comes next with its casquetted driver, and the smart feathered lady within; . . . the lazy P. M. leans from the window, watching a shabby man who is walking up the middle of the street carrying an exquisite wreath of roses carefully before him; but A. M. calls her away, for the Primitifs are to be visited and the Prisms must wait.

II.

The Hôtel St. Romain has the additional advantage of being quite close to the much-frequented shrine of early saints lately revealed to us by the spirited director of the Bibliothèque Nationale and his colleagues, and displayed for our advantage in the Pavillon de Marsan, which is the last addition to the glorious old palaces of the Louvre. This fine gallery is light and strong, and elegantly built, with handsome staircases and stately rooms on different levels, and with landings which give great variety and character, both of which are often wanting to State galleries. How well one knows the look of them, that turnstile at the entrance and then the stone stairs, and the short room, and the long room out of it—how monotonous and cut to pattern they are apt to be. This, however, is a beautiful home of art, rather than a gallery; nothing is crowded, everything is in its place, and the walls are lined with soft coloured stuffs of delicate shades admirably adapted to their purpose. The Pavillon de Marsan is near the opening of the Rue de Rivoli. Two or three flags and a couple of sentries stand at the entrance. Also the portrait of a medieval lady delicately tinted and securely framed invites the passers by to enter and to enjoy the feast within; to enjoy the beautiful things which were first recorded for our use when other Edwards were ruling in England, and when Dante was walking the streets of Florence. There hang the pictures on the

walls, of delicate sage-green, or where soft strawberry hangings of silk set off carvings and old frames and faded gildings. The pictures have come hither from far and near, across seas and centuries, from convents and palaces and churches; some have lived all these years concealed under other names than their own, and are only now discovered to be themselves.

There is a in Paris

Eyck and
The work

Paris and Prisms are familiar to us all. Primitifs are to a certain degree a new revelation of French inspiration, and this charming school is now, for the first time, catalogued, organised, and collected from afar, brought from convents and churches and distant country places, by the care of Monsieur Bouchot and his patriotic colleagues the Frenchmen of to-day. We have seen some of the pictures before-we have known them under other names such as Van Eycks and Ghirlandajos. Now under their true flag they appear, and in their true nationality, and as they rise before us, one by one, each seems to be a proof of that which is yet to be made certain. Time has a magnetism of its own, for us beings of an hour, who stand before the work which the painter placed upon his easel six or seven centuries ago. picture belonging to the Church of the Madeleine No. 37 in the catalogue. It has been ascribed to Van to Albert Dürer in turn. Experts may disagree. speaks to us still as it might have done had we been there when the nameless artist first painted his vision upon the panel; and we still respond to the noble sweet sentiment, to the exquisite care and detail. The Virgin kneels in the long cathedral aisle; she is sumptuous in her damask robes, simple in her modest majesty a cup with lilies stands on the pavement at her knee, a missal lies open on the carved reading desk-an angel, with noble, open looks and great wings, kneels before her from some inner shrine. The angel, too, is robed, and with upraised left hand he seems to emphasise his message. The rays of light stream through a circular window overhead, each column is traced with care, each complicated arch is in its place, each shadow falls in exquisite beauty and perfection. No one is near, though figures are to be seen at the far end of the vista.

...

Painted yesterday, the picture would be beautiful and touch one's admiration; coming to us through the centuries it brings added mystery and reality too. Perhaps angels were really to be seen crossing among the columns of the great cathedrals in those days; perhaps in those times ladies knelt like queens, wearing royal

robes. The cathedrals are still there; the carvings are still to be admired, the quaint gurgoyles, the fanciful decorations, bats and birds and exquisite leaves carved in the stonework, and beyond it all as you look, you somehow feel that the very spirit of holiness is there.

'C'est très curieux,' says the little French lady, a pretty little lady enough, with frills and furbelows; her husband has a ribbon in his coat. The people all about seem educated and well bred. The ladies of the present, in their elaborate fanciful dresses, are scarcely less dainty than the saints and queens and Magdalenes they have come to see.

The French couples talk to each other with their pretty and rapid intonation. A nun in a dress which might have come bodily out of one of the pictures goes by, alone, carefully marking her catalogue. In a doorway under the mitred head of some saintly bishop the guardian of the place sits nodding peacefully.

'C'est du Ghirlandajo pur et simple,' says an Elégante, gazing at one of Maître de Moulins' masterpieces. And while the human beings pass by discoursing, discriminating, the goodly company of the past remains indifferent, altogether oblivious of our presence reading, praying, pondering, only a few of the martyrs look somewhat conscious, and no wonder. With what stately dignity yonder saint advances across the open place carrying his own glorified head which the executioner has just cut from his body, or let us admire the gracious ladies with their palms and jagged wheels, or Jean Perreal's slim and self-respecting lamb on its exquisite spindle legs.

'Where does he come from, that delicious master, whom for the moment we are obliged to call by the ambiguous name of le Maître de Moulins?' says the author of the catalogue. From Paris, from Tours, from Lyons, from Moulins? Did he see Italy? asks M. Lafenestre, the writer of the admirable introduction.

'Par pitié Messieurs les archivistes nos amis,' he cries, 'un petit document, un tout petit document, s'il vous plaît, qui nous permette de saluer cet homme glorieux, de son vrai nom!'

Entering what one might call the Salle carrée of the Primitif Exhibition, there before one is a whole wall covered with the works of this so-called 'Maître de Moulins.' One is attracted at once by the master's great triptych which hangs in the place of honour in the centre, and which the catalogue attributes to the year 1498.

In the middle panel stands the Virgin with the Child, surrounded by angels, and as the painter is fond of doing, he has represented