McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 6, May, 1896

by Various

A CENTURY OF PAINTING.

JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET.—PARENTAGE AND EARLY INFLUENCES.—HIS LIFE AT BARBIZON.—VISITS TO MILLET IN HIS STUDIO.—HIS PERSONAL APPEARANCE.—HIS OWN COMMENTS ON HIS PICTURES.—PASSAGES FROM HIS CONVERSATION.

BY Will H. Low.

hese papers, disclaiming any other authority than that which appertains to the conclusions of a practising painter who has thought deeply on the subject of his art, have nevertheless avoided the personal equation as much as possible. A conscientious endeavor has been made to consider the work of each painter in the place which has been assigned him by the concensus of opinion in the time which has elapsed since his work was done. In the consideration of Jean François Millet, however, I desire for the nonce to become less impersonal, for the reason that it was my privilege to know him slightly, and in the case of one who as a man and as a painter occupies a place so entirely his own, the value of recorded personal impressions is greater, at least for purposes of record, than the registration of contemporary opinion concerning him.

I must further explain that, as a young student who received at his hands the kindly reception which the master, stricken in health, and preoccupied with his work, vouchsafed, I could only know him superficially. It may have been the spectacle of youthful enthusiasm, or the modest though dignified recognition of the reverence with which I approached him, that made this grave man unbend; but it is certain that the few times when I was permitted to enter the rudely built studio at Barbizon have remained red-letter days in my life, and on each occasion I left Millet with an impression so strong and vital that now, after a lapse of twenty years, the work which he showed me, and the words which he uttered, are as present as though it all had occurred yesterday. The reverence which I then felt for this great man was born of his works, a few of which I had seen in 1873 in Paris; and their constant study, and the knowledge of his life and character gained since then, have intensified this feeling.

Reproduced by permission of Braun, Clement & Co. A replica of Millet's picture in the Salon of 1861, which is now owned by Mr. Quincy Shaw, Boston, Massachusetts. Charles Jacque, who had quarrelled with Millet, after seeing this picture, went to him and said: "We cannot be friends; but I have come to say that you have painted a masterpiece."

Jean François Millet was born October 4, 1814, in the hamlet of Gruchy, a mere handful of houses which lie in a valley descending to the sea, in the department of the Manche, not far from Cherbourg. He was the descendant of a class which has no counterpart in England or America, and which in his native France has all but disappeared. The rude forefathers of our country may have in a degree resembled the French peasant of Millet's youth; but their Protestant belief made them more independent in thought, and the problems of a new country, and the lack of stability inherent to the colonist, robbed them of the fanatical love of the earth, which is perhaps the strongest trait of the peasant. Every inch of the ground up to the cliffs above the sea, in Millet's country, represented the struggle of man with nature; and each parcel of land, every stone in the walls which kept the earth from being engulfed in the floods beneath, bore marks of his handiwork. Small wonder, then, that this rude people should engender the painter who has best expressed the intimate relation between the man of the fields and his ally and foe, the land which he subjugates, and which in turn enslaves him. The inherent, almost savage, independence of the peasant had kept him freer and of a nobler type than the English yokel even in the time before the Revolution, and in the little hamlet where Millet was born, the great upheaval had meant but little. Remote from the capital, cultivating land which but for their efforts would have been abandoned as worthless, every man was a land-owner in a small degree, and the patrimony of Millet sufficed for a numerous family of which he was the eldest son. Sufficed, that is, for a Spartan subsistence, made up of unrelaxing toil, with few or no comforts, save those of a spiritual nature which came in the guise of religion.

Reproduced by permission of Braun, Clement & Co. This picture, popularly known as "The man with the hoe," was the cause of much discussion at the time of its exhibition. Millet was accused of socialism; of inciting the peasants to revolt; and from his quiet retreat in the country, he defended himself in a letter to his friend Sensier as follows: "I see very clearly the aureole encircling the head of the daisy, and the sun which glows beyond, far, far over the country-side, its glory in the skies; I see, not less clearly, the smoking plough-horses in the plain, and in a rocky corner a man bent with labor, who groans as he works, or who for an instant tries to straighten himself to catch his breath. The drama is enveloped in splendor. This is not of my creation; the expression, 'the cry of the earth,' was invented long ago."

Millet was reared by his grandmother, such being the custom of the country; the younger women being occupied in the service of the mastering earth, and the elders, no longer able to go afield, bringing up the children born to their children, who in turn replaced their parents in the never-ending struggle. This grandmother, Louise Jumelin, widow of Nicolas Millet, was a woman of great force of character, and extremely devout. The most ordinary occupation of the day was made the subject not of uttered prayer, for that would have entailed suspension of her ceaseless activity, but of spiritual example tersely expressed, which fell upon the fruitful soil of Millet's young imagination, and left such a lasting impression that to the end of his life his natural expression was almost Biblical in character of language.

Another formative influence of this young life was that of a granduncle, Charles Millet, a priest who, driven from his church by the Revolution, had returned to his native village and taken up the simple life of his people, without, however, abandoning his vocation. He was to be seen behind his plough, his priest's robe gathered up about his loins, his breviary in one hand, following the furrow up and down the undulating fields which ran to the cliffs.

Reproduced by permission of Braun, Clement & Co. Probably commenced at Cherbourg, where Millet took refuge with his family during the Franco-Prussian War, as Sensier mentions it on Millet's return. This picture, or a replica of it (Millet was fond of repeating his subjects, with slight changes in each case), was in his studio in 1873, and called forth the remark quoted in the text, about the women in his country.

Gifted with great strength, he piled up great masses of granite, to reclaim a precious morsel of earth from the hungry maw of the sea; lifting his voice, as he worked, in resonant chants of the church. He it was who taught Millet to read; and, later, it was another priest, the Abbé Jean Lebrisseux, who, in the intervals of the youth's work in the fields, where he had early become an efficient aid to his father, continued his instruction. With the avidity of intelligence Millet profited by this instruction, not only in the more ordinary studies, but in Latin, with the Bible and Virgil as text-books. His mind was also nourished by the books belonging to the scanty library of his granduncle. These were of a purely religious character—the "History of the Saints," the "Confessions" of St. Augustine, the letters of St. Jerome, and the works of Bossuet and Fénelon.

"The three fates of pauperism" was the disdainful appreciation of Paul de Saint-Victor on the first exhibition of this picture, while Edmond About wrote: "The picture attracts one from afar by its air of grandeur and serenity. It has the character of a religious painting. It is drawn without fault, and colored without crudity; and one feels the August sun which ripens the wheat." Sensier says: "The picture sold with difficulty for four hundred dollars. What is it worth to-day?"

In his father, whose strongest characteristic was an intense love of nature, Millet found an unconscious influence in the direction which his life was to follow. Millet recalled in after life that he would show him a blade of grass or a flower, and say: "See how beautiful; how the petals overlap; and the tree there, how strong and fine it is!" It was his father who was attentive to the

youth's first rude efforts, and who encouraged him when the decisive step was to be taken, which Millet, feeling that his labor in the fields was necessary to the common good of the family, hesitated to take. The boy was in his eighteenth year when his father said:

"My poor François, you are tormented between your desire to be an artist and your duty to the family. Now that your brothers are growing, they can take their turn in the fields. I have long wished that you could be instructed in the craft of the painter, which I am told is so noble, and we will go to Cherbourg and see what can be done."

Reproduced by permission of Braun, Clement & Co. Despite its fame, this is distinctly not Millet's masterpiece. During his life it sold for about ten thousand dollars, and later for one hundred and fifty thousand.

Thus encouraged, the boy made two drawings—one of two shepherds in blouse and sabots, one listening while the other played a rustic flute; and a second where, under a starlit sky, a man came from out a house, carrying bread for a mendicant at his gate. Armed with these two designs—typical of the work which in the end, after being led astray by schools and popular taste, he was to do—the two peasants sought a local painter named Mouchel at Cherbourg. After a moment of doubt as to the originality of the youth's work, Mouchel offered to teach him all that he knew.

Millet stayed with Mouchel some months. Then his father's death recalled him home, where his honest spirit prompted him to remain as the eldest son and head of the family, although his heart was less than ever in the fields. But this the mother, brought up in the spirit of resignation, would not allow him to do. "God has made you a painter. His will be done. Your father, my Jean Louis, has said it was to be, and you must return to Cherbourg."

Millet returned to Cherbourg, this time to the studio of one Langlois, a pupil of Gros, who was the principal painter of the little city. But Langlois, like his first master, Mouchel, kept him at work copying either his own studies or pictures in the city museum. After a few months, though, he had the honesty to recognize that his pupil needed more efficient instruction than he could give him, and in August, 1836, he addressed a petition to the mayor and common council of the city of Cherbourg, who took the matter into consideration, and, with the authorities of the department, voted a sum of one thousand francs—two hundred dollars—as a yearly allowance to Millet, in order that he might pursue his studies in Paris. Langlois in his petition asks that he be permitted to "raise without fear the veil of the future, and to assure the municipal council a place in the memory of the world for having been the first to endow their country with one more great name." Grandiloquent promise has often been made without result; but one must admire the hard-headed Norman councillors who, representing a little provincial city which in 1884 had but thirty-six thousand inhabitants, gave even this modest sum to assure a future to one who might reflect honor on his country.

Reproduced by permission of Braun, Clement & Co. A notable instance of the scope of Millet's power, as tender in depicting children as it is austere in "The Gleaners."

With a portion, of this allowance, and a small addition from the "economies" of his mother and grandmother, Millet went to Paris in 1837. The great city failed to please the country-bred youth, and, indeed, until the end of his life, Millet disliked Paris. I remember his saying that, on his visits from Barbizon to the capital, he was happy on his arrival at the station, but when he arrived at the column of the Bastille, a few squares within the city, the mal du pays took him by the throat.

At first he spent all his time in the Louvre, which revealed to him what the little provincial museum of Cherbourg had but faintly suggested. Before long, however, he entered the studio of Paul Delaroche, who was the popular master of the time. There he won the sobriquet of the "man of the woods," from a savage taciturnity which was his defence in the midst of the atelier jokes. He had come to work, and to work he addressed himself, with but little encouragement from master or comrades. Strong as a young Hercules, with a dignity which never forsook him, his studies won at least the success of attention. When a favorite pupil of the master remonstrated that his men and women were hewed from stone, Millet replied tranquilly, "I came here because there are Greek statues and living men and women to study from, not to please you or any one. Do I preoccupy myself with your figures made of honey and butter?"

Delaroche, won by the strength of the man, at length unbent, and showed him such favor as a commonplace mind could accord to native superiority. He advised him to compete for the Prix de Rome, warning him, however, that whatever might be the merit of his work, he could not take it that year, as it was arranged that another, approaching the limit of age, must have it. This revolted the simple nature of Millet, who refused to compete, and left the school.

A return to Cherbourg, where he married his first wife, who died at the end of two years; another sojourn in Paris, and a visit home of some duration; a number of portraits and pictures painted in Cherbourg and Havre, in which his talent was slowly asserting itself, brings us to 1845, when he remarried. Returning to Paris with his wife, he remained there until 1849, when he went to Barbizon "for a time," which was prolonged to twenty-seven years.

In all the years preceding his final return to the country, Millet was apparently undecided as to the definite character of his work. Out of place in a city, more or less influenced by his comrades in art, and forced to follow in a degree the dictation of necessity in the choice of subject, as his brush was his only resource and his family constantly increasing, his work of this period is always tentative. In painting it is luscious in color and firmly drawn and modelled, but it lacks the perception of truth which, when once released from the bondage of the city, began to manifest itself in his work. The first indication of the future Millet is in a picture in the Salon of 1848, "The Winnower," which has, in subject at least, much the character of the work which followed his establishment at Barbizon. For the rest, although the world is richer in beautiful pictures of charmingly painted nymphs, and of rustic scenes not altogether devoid of a certain artificiality, and in at least one masterly mythological picture of Oedipus rescued from the tree, through Millet's activity in these years, yet his work, had it continued on this plane, would have lacked the high significance which the next twenty-five years were to show.

Having endeavored to make clear the source from which Millet came, and indicated the formative influences of his early life, I may permit myself (as I warned my readers I should do) to return to my recollections of Barbizon in 1873, and the glimpses of Millet which my sojourn there in that and the following year afforded me.

Barbizon lies on a plain, more vast in the impression which it makes on the eye than in actual area, and the village consists of one long street, which commences at a group of farm buildings of some importance, and ends in the forest of Fontainebleau. About midway down this street, on the way to the forest, Millet's home stood, on the right of the road. The house, of two low stories, had its gable to the street, and on the first floor, with the window breast high from the ground, was the dining-room. Here, in pleasant weather, with the window wide open, sat Millet at the head of his patriarchal table, his children, of whom there were nine, about him; his good wife, their days of acute misery past, smiling contentedly on her brood, which, if I remember rightly, already counted a grandchild or more: as pleasant a sight as one could readily see. Later, in the autumn evenings, a lamplit replica of the same picture presented itself. Or, if the dinner was cleared away, one would see Madame Millet busy with her needle, the children at their lessons, and the painter, whom even then tradition

painted a sad and cheerless misanthrope, contentedly playing at dominoes with one of the children, or his honest Norman face wreathed in smiles as the conversation took an amusing turn. This, it is true, was when the master of the house was free from his terrible enemy, the headache, which laid him low so often, and which in these days became more and more frequent.

Reproduced by permission of Braun, Clement & Co. As Sensier remarks, Millet, with nine children, had abundant opportunity to study them. This charming drawing was one of the collection of Millet's pastels formed by M. Gavet, which was unfortunately dispersed by auction soon after the artist's death.

The house, to resume the description of Millet's home, went back at right angles from the street, and contained the various apartments of the family, many of them on the ground floor, and all of the most modest character. It was a source of wonder how so large a family could inhabit so small a house. The garden lay in front, and extended back of the house. A high wall with a little door, painted green, by which you entered, ran along the street, and ended at the studio, which was, like the dining-room, on the street. The garden was pleasant with flowers and trees, the kitchen garden being at the rear. But a few short years ago, within its walls Madame Millet plucked a red rose, and gave it to me, saying: "My husband planted this." Outside the little green door, on either hand, were stone benches set against the wall, on which the painter's children sometimes sat and played; but it is somewhat strange that I never remember Millet at his door or on the village street. He walked a great deal, but always went out of the garden to the fields back of the house, and from there gained the forest or the plain. Among the young painters who frequented Barbizon in those days (which were, however, long after the time when the men of Millet's age established themselves there), there were, strange as it may seem, few who cared for Millet's work, and many who knew little or nothing of it. The prejudices of the average art student are many and indurated. His horizon is apt to be bounded by his master's work or the last Salon success, and as Millet had no pupils, and had ceased to exhibit at the Salon, he was little known to most of the youths who, as I look back, must have made Barbizon a most undesirable place for a quiet family to live in. An accident which made me acquainted with Millet's eldest son, a painter of talent, seemed for a time to bring me no nearer to knowing the father until one day some remark of mine which showed at least a sincere admiration for his work made the son suggest that I should come and see a recently completed picture.

If the crowd of young painters who frequented the village were indifferent to Millet, such was not the case with people from other places. The "personally conducted" were then newly invented, and I have seen a wagon load of tourists, who had been driven to different points in the forest, draw up before Millet's modest door and express indignation in a variety of languages when they were refused admittance. There were many in those days who tried with little or no excuse to break in on the work of a man whose working days were already counted, and who was seldom free from his old enemy migraine. I was to learn this when—I hope after having had the grace to make it plain that, though I greatly desired to know Millet, I felt no desire to intrude—the son had arranged for a day when, at last, I was admitted to the studio.

Millet did not make his appearance at once; and when he came, and the son had said a few kindly words of presentation, he seemed so evidently in pain that I managed, in a French which must have been distinguished by a pure New York accent and a vocabulary more than limited, to express a fear that he was suffering, and suggested that my visit had better be deferred.

"No, it will pass," was his answer; and going to his easel he placed, with the help of his son, picture after picture, for my delectation.

It was Millet's habit to commence a great number of pictures. On some of them he would work as long, according to his own expression, as he saw the scene in nature before him; for, at least at this epoch, he never painted directly from nature. For a picture which I saw the following summer, where three great hay-stacks project their mass against a heavy storm cloud, the shepherd seeking shelter from the impending rain, and the sheep erring here and there, affected by the changing weather—for this picture, conveying, as it did, the most intense impression of nature, Millet showed me (in answer to my inquiry and in explanation of his method of work) in a little sketch-book, so small that it would slip into a waistcoat pocket, the pencilled outline of the three hay-stacks. "It was a stormy day," he said, "and on my return home I sat down and commenced the picture, but of direct studies—voila tout." Of another picture, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, of a young girl, life size, with a distaff, seated on a hillock, her head shaded by a great straw hat relieved against the sky, he told me that the only direct painting from nature on the canvas was in a bunch of grass in the foreground, which he had plucked in the fields and brought into his studio.

From the original painting, now in the collection of Mrs. W.H. Vanderbilt; reproduced by permission of Braun, Clement & Co. In his criticism of the Salon of 1850, where the picture was first exhibited, Théophile Gautier thus described it: "The sower advances with rhythmic step, casting the seed into the furrowed land; sombre rags cover him; a formless hat is drawn down over his brow; he is gaunt, cadaverous, and thin under his livery of misery; and yet life is contained in his large hand, as with a superb gesture he who has nothing scatters broadcast on the earth the bread of the future."

On this first day, it would be difficult to say how many pictures in various states of advancement I saw. The master would occasionally say, reflectively: "It is six months since I looked at that, and I must get to work at it," as some new canvas was placed on the easel. At first, fearing that he was too ill to have me stay, I made one or two motions to leave. But each time, with a kindly smile, I was bidden to stay, with the assurance that the headache was "going better." After a time I quite forgot everything in enthusiasm at what I saw and the sense that I was enjoying the privilege of a lifetime. The life of the fields seemed to be unrolled before me like some vast panorama. Millet's comments were short and descriptive of what he aimed to represent, seldom or never concerning the method of his work. "Women in my country," meaning Lower Normandy, of course, "carry jars of milk in that way," he said, indicating the woman crossing the fields with the milk-can supported by a strap on her shoulder. "When I was a boy there were great flights of wild pigeons which settled in the trees at night, when we used to go with torches, and the birds, blinded by the light, could be killed by the hundred with clubs," was his explanation of another scene full of the confusion of lights and the whirr of the bewildered pigeons.

Delightful for a sense of air through the cool and spacious room, and for the sculpturesque solidity of the group composed of the woman, the churn, and the cat.

"And you have not seen it since you were a boy?" I asked.

"No; but it all comes back to me as I work," was his answer.

From picture to picture, from question to kindly answer, the afternoon sped, and at length, in response to a question as to the relative importance of subject, the painter sent his son into the house whence he returned with a panel a few inches square. The father took it, wiped the dust from it, absent-mindedly, on his sleeve, with a half caressing movement, and placed it on the easel. "Voila! (There!)" was all he said. The panel represented three golden juicy pears, their fat sides relieved one against the other, forming a compact group which, through the magic of color, told of autumn sun, and almost gave the odor of ripened fruit. It was a lovely bit of painting, and much interested, I said: "Pardon me, but you seem as much or more proud of this than anything you have shown."

"Exactly," answered Millet, with an amused smile at my eagerness. "Everything in nature is good to paint, and the painter's business is to be occupied with his manner of rendering it. These pears, a man or a woman, a flock of sheep, all have the same qualities for a painter. There are," with a gesture of his hands to make his meaning clear, "things that lie flat, that are horizontal, like a plain; and there are others which stand up, are perpendicular; and there are the planes between: all of which should be expressed in a picture. There are the distances between objects also. But all this can be found in the simplest thing as in the most complicated."

"But," I again ventured, "surely some subjects are more important than others."

"Some are more interesting in the sense that they add to the problems of a painter. When he has to paint a human being, he has to represent truth of action, the particular character of an individual; but he must do the latter when he paints a pear. No two pears are alike."

I fear at the time I hardly understood the importance of the lesson which I then received; certainly not to the degree with which experience has confirmed it. But I have written it here, the sense, if not the actual language, because Millet has been so often misrepresented as seeking to point a moral through the subject of his pictures. When we recall the manner in which "The Angelus" was paraded through the country a few years ago, and the genuine sentiment of the simple scene—where Millet had endeavored to express "the things that lie flat, like a plain; and the things that stand up," like his peasants—was travestied by gushing sentimentalists, it is pleasant to think of the wholesome common sense of the great painter.

The background here is typical of that part of the forest of Fontainebleau which borders the plain of Barbizon.

The picture which I had specially come to see was meanwhile standing covered with a drapery, on another easel, and at length the resources of the studio were apparently exhausted. Millet asked me to step back a few paces to where a short curtain was placed on a light iron rod at right angles from the studio window, so that a person standing behind it saw into the studio while his eyes were screened from the glare of the window. The painter then drew the covering, and—I feel that what I am about to say may seem superlative, and I am quite willing to-day to account for it by the enthusiasm for the painter's work, which had been growing crescendo with each successive moment passed in the studio. Be that as it may, the picture which I saw caused me to forget where I was, to forget painting, and to look, apparently, on a more enchanting scene than my eyes had ever beheld—one more enchanting than they have since seen. It was a landscape, "Springtime," now in the Louvre. Ah me! I have seen the picture since, not once, but many times, and he who will go to Paris may see it. A beautiful picture; but of the transcendent beauty which transfigured it that day, it has but the suggestion. It is still a masterpiece, however, and still conveys, by methods peculiarly Millet's own, a satisfying sense of the open air, and the charm of fickle spring. The method is that founded on the constant observation of nature by a mind acute to perceive, and educated to remember. The method is one which misses many trivial truths, and thereby loses the superficial look of reality which many smaller men have learned to give; but it retains the larger, more essential truths. Though dependence on memory carried to the extent of Millet's practice would be fatal to a weaker man, it can hardly be doubted that it was the natural method for him.

I left the studio that day, walking on clouds. When I returned it was always to receive kindly and practical counsel. For Millet, though conscious, as such a man must be, of his importance, was the simplest of men. In appearance the portrait published here gives him in his youth. At the time of which I speak he was heavier, with a firm nose, eyes that, deeply set, seemed to look inwards, except, when directly addressing one, there was a sudden gleam. His manner of speech was slow and measured, perhaps out of kindness to the stranger, though I am inclined to think that it was rather the speech of one who arrays his 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.