Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 February 1913 — LIVES HERMIT'S LIFE [ARTICLE]

LIVES HERMIT'S LIFE

Degas, Greatest Living French Artist, Becomes a Recluse. Well Known Painter Calls Pictures “Murmured Prayers” and Rarely Opens His Doors for Visits of Strangers. Paris. —Degas, who has suddenly become famous to the larger public at the age of sixty-ninei through the sale of one of hi| paintings for $86,000, is very much of a hermit Failing eyesight has prevented him from painting for some years now, and his door laraxely-opanto strangers.Art discussions do not interest him. “No, sir,” he 6nce said, “I cannot talk painting; no one dbes who is a real painter, It is discussed in omnibuses, in cases, in drawing rooms. But not here. Painting is like a murmured prayer.” After the sale in which his picture, “Les Danseuses a la Barre,” for which he originally received only SIOO, sold for $86,000, he went to Neuilly, on the outskirts of Paris. From the window of a friend’s house he looked in astonishment at the peopled avenues. “In my time,” he said, “there was nothing here.”

As a rule he stays in Montmartre, and knows nothing of the newer parts of the city. Though he is the greatest living French painter, he never has been decorated. His hobby is collecting the pictures of Ingres. Every scrap of drawing of the great academic artist he treasures, which practice is an example of his contradictions, for he is one of the founders of the opposite -school. Nor is he kind to contemporaries, labeling one “The Little Steam Watteau” and another “The Rag-Pickers’ Raphael.” Some residents of the aristocratic Faubourg quarter and other Royalist partisans who do hot like the republic are showing their opposition to the government by issuing stamps—like the French feminists and the anti-al-coholic league—inscribed with more or less scurrilous sentiments. The government, however, does not give them much chance to have political effect on the citizen; letters so decorated will in future not be delivered. It had become a common custom for Royalists to adorn their letters, especially to soldiers in the army, with seditious labels. Sometimes the Due d’Orleans figured on the stamp; sofhqtimes an unflatter-

ing caricature of President -Falieres, or an ugly-looking female to represent the republic. The propaganda had become so active that the government decided to take action. The biolpgy of the bathypelaglc animals or creatures who live In the low-, est depths of the ocean is Httle known and mostly hypothetic. In a recent communication to the Academy of Sciences, M. Bouree, who accompanies all the oceanagraphic expeditions of the Prince of Monaco, has given the

results of his observations on the migrations of thesdi animals. He has observed that many species, notably the fish whose normal lair is during the day at a depth varying from 4,000 to 6,000 yards, rise during, the night to a short distance from the surface. Similar migrations had already been Observed among the smaller species 'known aB plankton, but had never been noticed in the case of creatures of a larger order.