CHAPTER I. A PRINCE OF
COURT PAINTERS
EXTRACTS FROM AN OLD FRENCH JOURNAL
Valenciennes, September 1701.
They have been renovating my father\'s large workroom. That
delightful, tumble-down old place has lost its moss-grown tiles and the
green weather-stains we have known all our lives on the high whitewashed
wall, opposite which we sit, in the little sculptor\'s yard, for the coolness, in
summertime. Among old Watteau\'s workpeople came his son, "the
genius," my father\'s godson and namesake, a dark-haired youth, whose
large, unquiet eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various drawings
which lie exposed here. My father will have it that he is a genius indeed,
and a painter born. We have had our September Fair in the Grande Place, a
wonderful stir of sound and colour in the wide, open space beneath our
windows. And just where the crowd was busiest young Antony was found,
hoisted into one of those empty niches of the old Hotel de Ville, sketching
the scene to the life, but with a kind of grace--a marvellous tact of
omission, as my father pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality
seen from one\'s own window--which has made trite old Harlequin, Clown,
and Columbine, seem like people in some fairyland; or like infinitely
clever tragic actors, who, for the humour of the thing, have put on motley
for once, and are able to throw a world of serious innuendo into their
burlesque looks, with a sort of comedy which shall be but tragedy seen
from the other side. He brought his sketch to our house to-day, and I was
present when my father questioned him and commended his work. But the
lad seemed not greatly pleased, and left untasted the glass of old Malaga
which was offered to him. His father will hear nothing of educating him
as a painter. Yet he is not ill-to-do, and has lately built himself a new stone
house, big and grey and cold. Their old plastered house with the black
timbers,