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The gesture sits between pleading and presenting a bill. Delacroix painted the cause a body before Europe sent the fleet.

By the spring of 1826 Missolonghi had been under siege for a year, and the little lagoon town had become the most famous place in Europe, because Byron had died there two years earlier and the newspapers had never left. Inside the walls the arithmetic of the blockade had run out: the garrison and the town, perhaps 10,000 people, had eaten the horses, then the mules, then the rats, then boiled hides and seaweed. Surrender to Ibrahim Pasha's army meant the slave markets. On the night of 10 April, Palm Sunday eve, they chose the third option: everyone who could walk would walk out, through the siege lines, in three columns, fighters on the flanks and families in the middle. The plan needed silence and got betrayal; the columns were expected. Of the thousands who went into the dark perhaps 1,300 reached the mountains. Those too old, too wounded or too late stayed behind with the powder magazines, and an old defender named Christos Kapsalis waited in his house, crowded with the sick and the elderly, until the Egyptians filled the courtyard, then put his torch into the powder. The bishop of Rogon did the same at the windmill. The town that fell that night was mostly rubble and mostly empty, and the empire that took it won nothing anyone could spend. Europe, which had watched the siege in weekly installments, converted its grief into subscriptions, concerts, committees and, at last, warships: the allied fleet that broke Ottoman sea power at Navarino the following year, an accident of escalation this museum files under An Untoward Event, was philhellenism with its sleeves rolled. And in Paris, within months of the news, the young Delacroix put a canvas into a benefit exhibition for the Greeks: no battle, no columns, no massacre. A woman in Greek dress kneels on broken marble, arms open in a gesture between pleading and accounting; from the rubble under the slab a single hand emerges; behind her, small and satisfied, an enemy standard-bearer plants his flag among the stones. He called it Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, and it did for the Greek war what his Liberty would do for a French one four years later: gave a cause a body. The two paintings hang in this museum's memory side by side, the barricade goddess and the graveyard one, propaganda in the only sense worth keeping, grief made unignorable. The canvas lives at Bordeaux; the hand in the rubble was never given a name, which was the point.