McClures Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 | Page 8

thoughts beforehand, and produces them in orderly sequence. In dress
he was like the ordinary bourgeois in the country, wearing generally a
woven coat like a cardigan jacket in the studio, at the door of which he
would leave his sabots and wear the felt slippers, or _chaussons_,
which are worn with the wooden shoes. This was not the affectation of
remaining a peasant; every one in the country in France wears _sabots_,
and very comfortable they are.
One more visit stands out prominently in my memory. It came about in
this wise. In the summer of 1874 the "two Stevensons," as they were
known, the cousins Robert Louis and Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson
(the author of the recent "Life of Velasquez," and the well-known
writer on art), were in Barbizon. It fell that the cousins, in pessimistic
vein, were decrying modern art--the great men were all dead; we
should never see their like again; in short, the mood in which we all fall
at times was dominant. As in duty bound, I argued the cause of the
present and future, and as a clinching argument told them that I had it
in my power to convince them that at least one of the greatest painters
of all time was still busy in the practice of his art. Millet was not much
more than a name to my friends, and I am certain that that day when we
talked over our coffee in the garden of Siron's inn, they had seen little
or none of his work. I ventured across the road, knocked at the little
green door, and asked permission to bring my friends, which was
accorded for the same afternoon. In half an hour, therefore, I was
witness of an object lesson of which the teacher was serenely
unconscious. Of my complete triumph when we left there was no doubt,
though one of my friends rather begged the question by insisting that I
had taken an unfair advantage; and that, as he expressed it, "it was not
in the game, in an ordinary discussion, between gentlemen, concerning
minor poets, to drag in Shakespeare in that manner."
I saw Millet but once after this, when late in the autumn I was returning
to Paris, and went, out of respect, to bid him farewell. He was already
ill, and those who knew him well, already feared for his life. Not
knowing this, it was a shock to learn of his death a few months
after--January 20, 1875. The news came to me in the form of the

ordinary notification and convocation to the funeral, which, in the form
of a _lettre de faire part_, is sent out on the occasion of a death in
France, not only to intimate friends, but to acquaintances.
Determined to pay what honor I could, I went to Barbizon, to find, as
did many others gone for the same sad purpose, that an error in the
notices sent, discovered too late to be rectified, had placed the date of
the funeral a day later than that on which it actually occurred. Millet
rests in the little cemetery at Chailly, across the plain from Barbizon,
near his lifetime friend, Theodore Rousseau, who is buried there. I will
never forget the January day in the village of Barbizon. Though Millet
had little part in the village life, and was known to few, a sadness, as
though the very houses felt that a great man had passed away, had
settled over the place. I sought out a friend who had been Millet's friend
for many years and was with him at the last, and as he told me of the
last sad months, tears fell from his eyes.

CHAPTERS
FROM A LIFE.
BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS,
Author of "The Gates Ajar," "A Singular Life," etc.
"THE GATES AJAR" WITH THE CRITICS AND THE
PUBLIC.--THE AUTHOR'S FIRST STUDY.--READING REVIEWS
OF ONE'S OWN BOOKS.--CORRESPONDENCE WITH READERS
OF "THE GATES AJAR."
As was said in the last paper, "The Gates Ajar" was written without
hope or expectation of any especial success, and when the happy storm
broke in truth, I was the most astonished girl in North America.
From the day when Mr. Fields's thoughtful note reached the Andover
post-office, that miracle of which we read often in fiction, and
sometimes in literary history, touched the young writer's life; and it
began over again, as a new form of organization.
As I look back upon them, the next few years seem to have been a
series of amazing phantasmagoria. Indeed, at the time, they were
scarcely more substantial. A phantom among phantoms, I was borne
along. Incredulous of the facts, and dubious of my own identity, I
whirled through readjustments of scene, of society, of purposes, of

hopes, and now, at last,