In Courbet's Les Demoiselles de Village (Fig. 1) three young women dressed in their country best pause in the sunlight so that one of them can offer some bread from their basket to a farm girl. A small dog focuses its attention on two cattle grazing nearby. The weathered cliffs of Ornans stand as a backdrop for this rustic encounter. The painting's narrative simplicity and the artist's comment, “J'ai fait du grâcieux,”1 have encouraged art historians to accept the painting as a genre work separate from Courbet's canvases of political persuasion painted between 1848 and 1855.2 In fact the painting's full title, Les Demoiselles de Village faisant l'aumone a une gardeuse de vaches dans un vallon d'Ornans, lends itself to an interpretation of the work as a straightforward illustration of a charity theme. A closer look shows that the painting is much more; its simplicity veils its levels of meaning and demonstrates again the validity of the artist's statement, “Titles alone never give a true idea of things.”3