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It occurred to certain capitalists that if people would go to see one Dore, why would not a Dore gallery pay?

A company was formed, agents were sent to Paris and negotiations begun. Finally, on payment of three hundred thousand dollars, forty large canvases were secured, with a promise of more to come.

Dore took the money, and, the agents being gone, ran home to tell his mother. She was at dinner with a little company of invited guests. Gustave vaulted over the piano, played leap-frog among the chairs, and turning a handspring across the table, incidentally sent his heels into a thousand-dollar chandelier that came toppling down, smashing every dish upon the table, and frightening the guests into hysterics.

“It’s nothing,” said Madame Dore; “it’s nothing–Gustave has merely done a good day’s work!”

The “Dore Gallery” in London proved a great success. Spurgeon advised his flock to see it, that they might the better comprehend Bible history; the Reverend Doctor Parker spoke of the painter as “one inspired by God”; Sunday-schools made excursions thither; men in hobnailed shoes knelt before the pictures, believing they were in the presence of a vision.

And all these things were duly advertised, just as we have been told of the old soldier who visited the Gettysburg Cyclorama at Chicago and looking upon the picture, he suddenly cried to his companion, “Down, Bill, down! by t’ Lord, there’s a feller sightin’ his gun on us!”

Barnum offered the owners twice what they paid for the “Dore Gallery,” with intent to move the pictures to America, but they were too wise to accept.

Twenty-eight of the canvases were eventually sold, however, for a sum greater than was paid for the lot, yet enough remained to make a most representative display; and no American in London misses seeing the Dore Gallery, any more than we omit Madame Tussaud’s Wax-Works.

In Eighteen Hundred Seventy-three, Dore visited England and was welcomed as a conquering hero. The Prince of Wales and the nobility generally paid him every honor. He was presented to the Queen, and Victoria thanked him for the great work he had done, and asked him to inscribe for her a copy of the “Dore Bible.”

More than this, the Queen directed that several Dore pictures be purchased and placed in Windsor Castle.

Of course, all Paris knew of Dore’s success in England. Paris laughed. “What did I tell you?” said Berand. And Paris reasoned that what England and America gushed over must necessarily be very bad. The directors of the Salon made excuses for not hanging his pictures.

Dore had become rich, but his own Paris–the Paris that had been a foster-mother to him–refused to accredit him the honor which he felt was his due.

In Eighteen Hundred Seventy-eight, smarting under the continued gibes and geers of artistic France, he modeled a statue which he entitled “Glory.” It represents a woman holding fast in affectionate embrace a beautiful youth, whose name we are informed is Genius. The woman has in one hand a laurel-wreath; hidden in the leaves of this wreath is a dagger with which she is about to deal the victim a fatal blow.

Dore grew dispirited, and in vain did his mother and near friends seek to rally him out of the despondency that was settling down upon him. They said, “You are only a little over forty, and many a good man has never been recognized at all until after that–see Millet!”

But he shook his head.

When his mother died, in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-one, it seemed to snap his last earthly tie. Of course he exaggerated the indifference there was towards him; he had many friends who loved him as a man and respected him as an artist.

But after the death of his mother he had nothing to live for, and thinking thus, he soon followed her. He died in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-three, aged fifty years.