OMINIQUE INGRES consecrated himself solemnly to an artistic career when he was still a mere slip of a boy, but he was long unable to choose definitely between his violin and his paint-brush and pencil. At one time he neglected drawing for music because his young soul was dominated by his admiration for Gluck, whose glorious career had just ended. It was the sight of a copy of a Madonna of Raphael that decided his future. From the moment he came under the spell of "La Vierge à la Chaise" he never ceased for an instant to give painting the preference over music, and he became one of the greatest painters and the greatest teacher of painting, probably, of his time. But he continued throughout his exceptionally long life to devote to his violin. his hours of leisure, with the result that the phrase le violon d'Ingres passed into the French language, where it plays very much the same rôle as does the word avocation in the English language; indicating, that is, any employment what

soever which serves to repose a man from his chosen trade. The salon of "Poil et Plume" ("Bristle and Quill" or, more freely, "Brush and Pen") is an exposition of the products of violons d'Ingres (in this particular case, painting and sculpture) of French writers.

THE SKETCHES OF GAUTIER

Théophile Gautier's early ambition was to become a painter. At seven or eight years of age he copied with a pen the etchings of Ozanne in order to help him to rig the wooden vessels which he made with his jack-knife. A little later, he painted the scenery for the miniature card-board theatres with which he was then amusing himself. During his first years as a student at the Lycée Charlemagne, he pilfered time from his study and recitation hours to make drawings. and write verses. Of the concluding years at the lycée, he writes in his reminiscences: "At this time I had no idea of becoming a littérateur; my taste disposed me rather to painting, and before I had finished my philosophy I entered the atelier of Rioult. . . . Rioult found

my first study full of chic-an accusation at least premature." Gautier lived at No. 8 of the Place Royale (now Place des Vosges). After the Revolution of 1830, Victor Hugo, who was then eight or nine years his senior and in full glory, came to live at No. 6. Gautier speedily came under the domination of Hugo and was soon on terms of intimacy with him, so far as intimacy was possible with a divinity "whom," as a Hugo disciple puts it, "we were astonished to see walk in the street with us like a simple mortal, for it seemed to us that he should never go out except on a triumphal car drawn by a quadriga of white horses with a winged victory suspending a crown of gold above his head." "The neighbourhood of the illustrious chief of roman

ticism," writes Gautier, "rendered my relations with him and with the romantic school naturally more frequent. Little by little, I neglected painting and concentrated my attention on literary ideas. Hugo," he adds with a touch of irony, "did not dislike me and let me sit like a familiar page on the steps of his feudal throne."

If the works of Gautier exposed at "Poil et Plume" fail to convey the impression that a great painter was lost to the world when he abandoned painting for literature, they at least indicate that he would have become a creditable manipulator of the brush. He is represented by a distinguished portrait of the dancer Carlotta Grisi (who appeared at the Opera in his ballets Griselle and La

Peri), by a small portrait of himself and by several pen-and-ink drawings of female heads, including that of "Amany," the Indian dancer of "Tindivini-Pourom."

HUGO AND HIS EGOTISM

When Victor Hugo's Marion Delorme was read before the troupe of the PorteSaint-Martin Theatre, the actor Laferrière, then a young man, protested against the insignificant rôle assigned him, in which he would have only ten lines to recite. Hugo promptly reduced him to silence by thundering, "Ten lines of Victor Hugo are something not to be refused-for they endure." Hugo attached a similar exaggerated significance to everything he did and to every object that was in any way associated with him. For instance, he considered his drawings, which were for the most part commonplace enough, of sufficient importance to make them the subject of a testamentary provision. In his will of August 31, 1881, he wrote: "I give my drawings and everything which shall be drawn by me to the National Library of Paris, which

ÉMILE BERGERAT, THE POET AND DRAMATIC

AUTHOR. PRESIDENT OF THE PEN
AND THE BRUSH

MAURICE MONTÉGUT, THE NOVELIST. VICEPRESIDENT OF THE PEN AND THE BRUSH

will be one day the Library of the United States of Europe." Hugo's drawings are said to have been produced more often than not in the following manner: If a blot of ink chanced to fall on his paper while he held his pen aloft in quest of a word or rhyme, he enlarged the spot absent-mindedly and made additions to it instinctively under the influence of a species of sub-conscious direction until he had produced a sinister moonlight scene or a "venerable bourg dominating with its bristling ruins the shuddering waters of a river of leg end." He elaborated with great care, however, during his irksome exile at Guernsey certain crude impressions he had transferred to his sketch-book during his journeys in the valley of the Rhine. Furthermore, being a great lover of children, he drew figures of the most extravagant sort for the amusement of the young people of his household. The ominous "Château" (the signature of which is, characteristically, nearly as large as the Château) and the "Storm Effect" at "Poil et Plume" belong to the former class and the "Bons Points" to the latter. "Bons Points" is a sort of whimsical diptych. On the right, is "Jeanne, who Weeps over the Little Poor Children"-a very sober little girl wearing wings and a formidable halo; on the left, "George, who laughs because Jeanne is so very Good"-a little boy provided with a positively impish grin.

Both these heads might have been copied directly from the terrible cherubs on the black tombstones of the venerable New England cemeteries. The Hugo exhibit also includes a curious nude.

THE VANITY OF PAUL VERLAINE

The vanity of Paul Verlaine was scarcely second to that of Victor Hugo (as Anatole France has pointed out in his exquisite study of M. Choulette in Le Lys Roubge), but it was vanity of a vastly different order; it did not extend

me, and although I was a coward in the dark, the night allured me, curiosity pushed me toward it, I sought in it I know not what of white, of grey, des nuances perhaps. It is without doubt to these dispositions I owed-if debt there. were a most precocious and very real taste for making scrawls with ink and pencil and for spreading carmine, Prussian blue and yellow over all the scraps of paper that fell into my hands. I drew epileptic worthies, whom I coloured ferociously-all in two strokes and three sweeps of pen, pencil and brush. I have retained a mania for blackening the margins of my manuscripts and the body of my intimate letters with formless illustrations which vile flatterers pretend to find droll."

Verlaine's drawings are as naïve and disjointed as his labyrinthine prose, but these very qualities endear them to his admirers; and those of his friends who are fortunate enough to possess them would not trade them for impeccable works of art. "Poil et Plume" displays a score of them, including a portrait of Verlaine's poet-friend Arthur Rimbaud, author of Illuminations and Le Bâteau Ivre. Rimbaud himself is represented by nine or ten pen-and-ink sketches which disclose a genuine talent for caricature.

to the drawings for the making of which this glorified vagabond always had time enough and to spare and which he scattered recklessly to the four winds of heaven. In his reminiscences of his childhood Verlaine describes the attraction drawing and painting had for him. from his earliest years. "My eyes especially," he writes, "were precocious; I fixed everything, no detail of the aspects of things escaped me. I was without ceasing on the chase for forms, for colours, for shadows. The day fascinated

BAUDELAIRE AND MONNIER

In the three sombre pen-and-ink sketches of fateful women by Baudelaire at "Poil et Plume," there is little to indicate that the author of the incomparable "Fleurs du Mal" would have merited, as a wielder of the brush, as high praise as a great poet gave him for his poetry. "You create a new shudder in literature." Their bad art is only surpassed by their bad humour. It is only fair to add, however, that the critic, Léon Maillard, lauds them for recalling "the elegances of Constantin Guys."

Henri Monnier--unlike Gautier-never came to a troublesome parting of the ways where he felt constrained to make a definite choice between painting and literature. He was a professional writer, a professional artist and a professional actor and equally applauded in all three capacities. As Wagner conceived it his