thoroughfare, and through a narrow alley a small courtyard is reached, where, on the left, opens a shining oak door, revealing a flight of polished winding stairs. A bell at the foot of the stairway announces the visitor's coming. Two flights up a door clicks, and M. de Monvel comes courteously forward to greet his guests on the landing. In his atelier, surrounded by his canvases, he is a gracious and genial host, free from artistic pose and affectation, combining with the simplicity and eagerness of a child the serious dignity of the worker, the man of distinct talent, who is absorbed in giving to the world the expressions of his original conceptions. His sense of humor is delightful. He has an amusing habit of half closing his eyes and looking from under his heavy eyebrows, and seems with this narrow, concentrated vision to see straight to the subtlest point of things.

Pacing up and down the room in his wellmade English clothes, followed by his sleek Irish setter, or sitting easily back in a luxurious arm-chair, the dog at his feet, he might be a gentleman of leisure, with no thought of a picture other than to buy it. But Paris, that vast workshop, holds no more painstaking, earnest worker than Boutet de Monvel. He began early in life with serious determination, and he works to-day with an ardor no less fervent than that of his youth, when he knew hardship, and, like the majority of those who finally succeed, was as familiar with discouragement as with hope. "No, no," he said almost irritably; "the painting of children is not my serious work; my dreams, my ambitions, were far different. I wished to do large canvases and decorations, but necessity forced me into another field."

In order to gain one's daily bread, one must give to the public what it demands. De Monvel was a husband and a father, and that he might supply the needs of his family he put aside for the time his larger ambition. "I went," he says, "from publisher to publisher in search of orders for illustration -in vain. I was thoroughly discouraged and disheartened, when at last a publisher gave me a child's history of France to illustrate; then came some work on a French edition of 'St. Nicholas.' I had never before painted children, but I did then."

As soon as he began to draw and paint children (which he did with an originality of scheme, a beauty of color, that make the little pictures works of art), a world of memories came to his aid. His resources

appeared to be inexhaustible. His clever schemes, his skilful execution, his variety of subjects, fill one with wonder at his intimate relation with child life. He explains it in a measure, very charmingly: "I had a houseful of little brothers and sisters. I was the eldest of them all, and they made a great impression upon me. I used to watch them at their games and plays, their funny little figures flying about; they were always with me; and, for the most part, my own little people, as I remember them in our home in Orléans, exist again to-day, in countless poses, as my picture-children. Of course I observe them constantly in the Bois and on the avenues, these little children of Paris, but I like to think that it is that influence from the past that has inspired a great deal of my pictured child life."

After his début appeared his delightful books, "Chansons et rondes" (1883), "Chansons de France" (1884)," Nos enfants" (1886), "La civilité puérile" (1887), "Fables de La Fontaine" (1888), "Xavière" (1890), "Jeanne d'Arc" (1897), until all that his publishers and his public asked of him was that he should draw children, children indefinitely. Thus was he forced into a field of art in which he has no rival. In "Chansons et rondes" and "Chansons de France," he has illustrated the old songs and dances, some of which correspond to our nursery rhymes, and some of which are folk-songs; for example, "Sur le pont d'Avignon" and "Malbrouck s'en va t'en guerre."

The children all through these books are distinctively French, of course. They belong only to the land of green-boled, slender trees, red-roofed villages, broad white roads, and gay boulevards. Their drolleries, their trickeries, their humor, are national; they are infectious and delightful. But in "Nos enfants" there is a lovely spirit of childhood which is universal, and the book is a poem from beginning to end. The text is that of Anatole France, who gives, in a few words, the summer-day life of a little peasant child, besides several other pastels of child life.

De Monvel's illustrations are full of atmosphere and an exquisite feeling for the outof-door world. The fine effects of light and shade, the tone and composition of these pictures, place them far beyond any others of their class, and proclaim them the work of a consummate artist. Boutet de Monvel spoke to the children of France as they had never been spoken to before. Bending over the bewitching pictures, they exclaimed, "Ah, he understands!" And the fathers