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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Vigée Le Brun, by Haldane MacFall
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Vigée Le Brun
+
+Author: Haldane MacFall
+
+Release Date: October 22, 2009 [EBook #30314]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIGÉE LE BRUN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Cover art]
+
+
+
+
+
+  MASTERPIECES
+  IN COLOUR
+  EDITED BY --
+  T. LEMAN HARE
+
+
+
+VIGÉE LE BRUN
+
+1755-1842
+
+
+
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE I.--MARIE ANTOINETTE.  Frontispiece
+
+(At Versailles)
+
+The first portrait that Vigée Le Brun painted, in her twenty-fourth
+year (1779) of Marie Antoinette.  Here is no hint of the tragedy that
+was to overwhelm the handsome young daughter of Austria; all was as yet
+but gaiety and roses and sunshine and pleasant airs, and the glamour
+that hovers about a throne.  But there are signs of the imperious
+temper of her house, combined with the levity and frivolity of manners
+which were so early to make her unpopular.
+
+[Illustration: Plate I.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+
+
+
+Vigée Le Brun
+
+
+BY HALDANE MACFALL
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT
+
+REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Title page art]
+
+
+
+
+LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
+
+NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.
+
+1907
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   I. The Beginnings
+  II. The Wonderful Child
+ III. Marriage and Motherhood
+  IV. Marie Antoinette
+   V. Sweet Exile
+  VI. The End
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Plate
+
+    I. Marie Antoinette  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Frontispiece
+         At Versailles
+
+   II. Madame Vigée Le Brun and Child
+         In the Louvre
+
+  III. Madame Vigée Le Brun and Child
+         In the Louvre
+
+   IV. Portrait of Madame Vigée Le Brun
+         In the National Gallery, London
+
+    V. The two elder Children of Marie Antoinette
+         At Versailles
+
+   VI. Portrait of Madame Molé-Raymond
+         In the Louvre
+
+  VII. Marie Antoinette and her Children
+         At Versailles
+
+ VIII. Peace bringing back Plenty
+         In the Louvre
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Vigée Le Brun]
+
+I
+
+THE BEGINNINGS
+
+In Paris, in the Rue Coquillière, Louis the Fifteenth being King of
+France--or rather the Pompadour holding sway thereover--there lived a
+witty, amiable fellow who plied the art of painting portraits in oils
+and pastels after the mediocre fashion that is called "pleasing." This
+Louis Vigée and his wife, Jeanne Maissin, moved in the genial
+enthusiastic circle of the lesser artists, passing through their sober
+day without undue excitement; for fame and wealth and the prizes of
+life were not for them.  Boucher was lord of art; and La Tour and
+Greuze and Chardin were at the height of their genius; but honest Louis
+Vigée could but plod on at his pleasing portraits, and sigh that the
+gods had not borne to him the immortal flame.
+
+Yet he was to come near to the glory of it--nearer than he thought.
+'Twas a pity that he was robbed of the splendour of basking in the
+reflected radiance, and by a fish's bone.
+
+It was to have its beginning in that year after the indolent but
+obstinate king, having fallen foul of his Parliaments in his game of
+facing-both-ways in the bitter strife 'twixt Church and people, patched
+up a peace with the Parliament men.
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE II.--MADAME VIGÉE LE BRUN AND CHILD
+
+(In the Louvre)
+
+In Vigée Le Brun's portrait of herself and her child we see in full
+career the Greek ideals that were come upon France--a France weary of
+light trifling with life, and of mere butterfly flitting from flower to
+flower.
+
+[Illustration: Plate II.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+Our worthy mediocre Vigée could remember the banished Parliament
+re-entering Paris in triumph on that fourth day of September in 1754
+amidst the exultant shouts of the people; the clergy looking on with a
+scowl the while.  On that same day was born to the Dauphin a son--the
+little fellow called the Duke de Berry--whom we shall soon see
+ascending the throne as the ill-starred Louis the Sixteenth, for the
+Dauphin was to be taken before the old king died.
+
+Honest waggish Vigée, painting industriously at his pleasing portraits,
+would recall it well; since, early in the following year, there was
+that to happen under his own modest roof which was to bring fame to his
+name, though he should not live to bask in its full glow.
+
+On the 10th of April 1755 there was born to him a little girl-child,
+whom they christened Elizabeth Louise Vigée, or as she herself wrote it
+across the title-page of her _Souvenirs_, Louise Elizabeth Vigée.  Into
+her little fingers Destiny set the skill that had been denied to her
+father; the flame was given to her.  And by the whimsy of things, there
+was also born in far-away Vienna, in this same year of 1755, in the
+palace of the Emperors of Austria, a little princess whom they
+christened Marie Antoinette; who was to marry the little seven-month
+old princeling that lay sucking his thumb in the Royal palace near by,
+and thereby to become future Queen of France.
+
+Like François Boucher, the great painter to the king, Elizabeth Vigée
+came to the pretty business with the advantage of being an artist's
+child; like him, she received her first lessons at an early age from
+her father; and, like him, she moved from earliest childhood in an
+atmosphere of art and artists.
+
+From her father she inherited a talent and taste for art, an amiable
+temper, a gift of wit; from her mother, a very handsome woman, she was
+dowered with a beauty for which she was as remarkable, and to which her
+many portraits of herself bear abundant witness.  From very childhood
+she began to display the proofs of her inheritance--that happy
+disposition and that charm of manner that were to make her one of the
+most winsome personalities of her time.  At the convent to which her
+parents sent her in her tenth year she fell to drawing on the margins
+of her books, filling them with little portrait-heads--an incessant
+habit that set her teachers grumbling at her lack of respect towards
+grammar and history.  But to her delighted father the grumbles were
+matter for laughter; in him she found an ally who was hugely proud to
+discover in his girl an inheritor of his gifts.  It is told of the fond
+father that the girl having taken to him one day a drawing, Vigée cried
+out exultantly: "You will be a painter, my girl, or there never was
+one!"
+
+Brought up, as the child was, in the world of artists, with the aims
+and ambitions and enthusiasms of artists for her very breath, she could
+not fail to find in such a world, besides the encouragement which was
+prodigally bestowed upon so young and promising a talent, the teaching
+needful to develop her powers.  Amongst the artists who were on
+friendly terms with the girl's father, and of whom Doyen was the most
+intimate, was Davesne, a member and deputy professor of the Academy of
+St. Luke--he who afterwards claimed to have taught the little Elizabeth
+the elements of painting.  Davesne's lessons were at best but few, and
+seem to have been limited to showing the eager child how to set a
+palette.  The girl was in fact picking up the crumbs that fell from
+many tables; at any rate she showed astoundingly precocious industry
+and gifts, and was soon making quite a stir amongst the painter-folk,
+and becoming a source of pride to her father.
+
+Vigée, however, was only destined to guide and encourage the child
+towards the path; he died on the 9th of May 1768 from swallowing a fish
+bone.  Little Elizabeth was but thirteen years old when this first
+great grief fell upon her.
+
+That was a strange world in which the child stood bewildered at the
+baffling cruelty of human destiny--this eighteenth-century France.  The
+Pompadour had died in the child's ninth year; her dogged and persistent
+enemy, the Dauphin, the year after her; the neglected queen now
+followed the Pompadour to the grave in the June of this same year that
+left little Elizabeth fatherless.
+
+Under the scandals of the Court, and the tyranny and corruption of the
+nobility and clergy, the French people were no longer concealing their
+distress under courtly phrases, nor groaning in secret.  The ideas of
+the new philosophers were penetrating and colouring public opinion.
+They were beginning to talk of the great antique days of Greece, of
+heroes, and of virtue, and of living and dying like Romans.  Fickle
+fashion was turning her back upon the art of old Boucher, and upon
+Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses and pleasant landscapes and bosky
+groves, and was taking up her abode with heroes and amongst picturesque
+ruins.  The Parliament men were demanding rights, were indeed going to
+prison and into banishment for those rights; nay, was not Choiseul the
+great minister of France; and Choiseul's power was deep planted in the
+rights of the people and founded on Parliaments.  All France was
+watching for the dawn of liberty.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE WONDERFUL CHILD
+
+The thirteen-year-old child suffered a grief so poignant at the loss of
+her father, to whom she had been passionately attached, that it
+threatened to have the gravest consequences on her future; had it not
+been for her father's old friend Doyen, who, transferring to the girl
+the deep affection he had had for the dead man, urged the child to take
+up her brushes again--for she was already painting from Nature.
+
+It was now that she entered the studio of Gabriel Briard, an historical
+painter and member of the Royal Academy; a mediocre artist (though
+superior to Davesne, who claimed to have been her teacher), but he was
+a fine draughtsman.
+
+To Briard's studio she went with a little friend, a year older than
+herself, Mademoiselle Bocquet, who was to become like herself a member
+of the Academy of Saint Luke; a girl of a certain talent who, however,
+abandoned painting on her early marriage.
+
+The two girls tripped it to Briard's studio like a couple of
+school-children, demurely escorted by a servant, who carried their
+dinner in a basket; and, as they went to their daily task, be sure the
+quick intelligent girl heard more than a little scandal of the
+Court--indeed all Paris more than whispered of it--scandal big with
+meaning for France, and for little Elizabeth not least of all.
+
+The tears of the king's grief over the dead body of his queen were
+scarce dried when Louis the Fifteenth still further degraded the
+dignity of the throne of France--still more dangerously brought royalty
+into contempt by publicly acknowledging as his new mistress a young
+woman from the gutters, the beautiful, laughing, reckless spendthrift
+Du Barry, to whom one of the king's first gifts was Louveciennes, where
+Elizabeth was afterwards to meet her.  Before the year was out Choiseul
+fell; and for the remaining four years that were left to the king
+France was governed by the milliner Du Barry and her precious trio,
+D'Aiguillon, Terray, and Maupeou; and rushed towards the abyss.
+
+However, these things troubled our precocious Elizabeth but little as
+yet.  The girl grew rapidly in craftsmanship and in personal beauty.
+Indeed, she developed towards womanhood as early and as swiftly as in
+skill of artistry, being remarkable for her prettiness, her freshness
+and delicacy of colouring, and her elegance of figure--early displaying
+the airy wit that, with these abundant gifts of her fairy godmother,
+were so valuable an aid to the reputation which she was achieving by
+her artistry at a time when most children are in the schoolroom.
+
+Her advance was so astounding that every one was talking about the
+girl; and the moment soon arrived when her master saw the pupil passing
+him in skill of hand and reputation as a painter; gazing dumbfounded at
+the stream of the greatest celebrities and personages of the day
+flocking to the studio of a girl of but fifteen years of age.
+
+How strange a thing the weaving of the web of Destiny!  In this very
+same year there came out of Austria a fifteen-year-old princess of its
+Royal House, leaving the home of her forefathers in tears, and amidst
+the tears of a people that had grown to love the winsome child; for,
+Marie Antoinette was setting forth on her life's adventure as future
+Queen of France, a tragic wayfaring for a butterfly!
+
+Elizabeth Vigée's extraordinary rise into notice brought her the
+friendship and counsel of Joseph Vernet, who gave her most precious
+advice which was a beacon to her career all her years: "My child," said
+he, "do not follow any system of schools.  Consult only the works of
+the great Italian and Flemish masters.  But, above all things, make as
+many studies as you can from Nature.  Nature is the supreme master.  If
+you study Nature with care it will prevent you from picking up any
+mannerisms."
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE III.--MADAME VIGÉE LE BRUN AND CHILD
+
+(In the Louvre)
+
+Vigée Le Brun painted another portrait of herself and her little
+girl-child; and she painted both, fortunately for her fame, when her
+skill was at its increase.  They stand out, with all their limitations,
+pure and exquisite as the Madonna and Child of Italy's finest
+achievement; for they were painted by a woman of genius with the
+passionate love of a child that is the wondrous heritage of woman--none
+the less religious in that it apes no show of religion.
+
+[Illustration: Plate III.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+Doyen and Greuze also helped her with suggestions; but she was from the
+beginning her own teacher.  Davesne and Briard only flattered
+themselves by claiming her tutoring.  The girl showed in no way any
+slightest sign of their influence.  Ardent and enthusiastic in her
+pursuit of art, she haunted the galleries and private collections, but
+above all she went to Nature.  Naturalness is by consequence a marked
+attribute of one who painted in this artificial age--in portraiture she
+largely escaped the conventional style, both its limitations and, be it
+also confessed, something of that great beauty of style and that superb
+decorative splendour that mark the handsome achievement of Nattier and
+Drouais and their fellows.  Nor must it be forgotten that the realism
+claimed by the later years, and the naturalism claimed for this girl's
+art, were already to be seen in full career in the master-work of La
+Tour in portraiture, and in the still-life of Chardin.  This girl's
+genius never reached to the force of La Tour, nor the superb handling
+or colour-sense or vigour of Chardin, but she painted with rare skill
+the eminent women of her day and, with near as remarkable a skill, more
+than one man; her loss would have left a serious gap in the statement
+of the French genius of the end of the seventeen hundreds.
+
+It has been a custom too long indulged in by literary critics to praise
+her at the expense of Boucher's "conventionality"; but she never
+painted a portrait that surpassed the Wallace "Pompadour" or the
+"Infant Orleans," to say nothing of other rare portraits from Boucher's
+easel.  To set her up in rivalry against one of the greatest decorative
+artists of the years is but to give her an ugly fall.  The astounding
+part is not that she painted better than she did, but that she achieved
+what she did.
+
+But free from convention?  No.  She was a woman, and a painter of
+women--a painter of women from the woman's point of view that desires
+the world only to think of woman in her pose as woman, reticent,
+careful to screen the impulsive, most of all the vexatious, the
+violent, and the irregular moods of femininity's temperament from the
+eyes of the passer-by; always eager to show woman dressed for the part,
+and well dressed.  She was incapable of stating the deeps of character;
+and had she had the power, she would have looked upon it as something
+of an indecency--or worse, an indelicacy.  She would, in fact, have
+preferred to deny the deeps.  She sets her sitter ever in the
+drawing-room of fashion, draws a heavy curtain with a rattle between
+the drawing-room and the inner boudoir (the "sulking room"), slams the
+door on the bedroom, or any hint that there is a bedroom, before she
+cries "come in," to admit us to her studio; she prefers to show the
+woman in her properties as the creature of fashion, not in the intimacy
+of her inner living and full significance.
+
+This is as much and as absolutely convention as any tricking out of
+ladies as Dresden shepherdesses, and the more subtle in that it is the
+less obvious; as much convention as any painting of large eyes or
+rose-bud mouths.  It is as misleading as convention.  But it is the
+basis of a woman's life; and, in that, it is true.
+
+Boucher has been blamed for being conventional; is often sneered at as
+the arch-make-believe.  But when he painted women he painted them as
+men really see them with their masks off, and with all their allure of
+femininity.  This sneer of convention is a two-edged sword.
+
+In the year that they found Boucher dead, seated at his easel before an
+unfinished canvas of Venus, this girl of fifteen discovered herself
+celebrated; saw her studio invaded by the flower of the world of
+fashion; the women of the nobility at the French Court visiting her;
+the exclusive doors of the Faubourg St. Germain thrown open to her;
+princesses, duchesses, countesses, celebrities of the day and strangers
+of distinction her friends.  She was in close touch with the leading
+artists of her day--Le Moyne, blunt Quentin de La Tour, and the rest.
+
+The girl, in spite of her astounding industry, was soon wholly unable
+to carry out the orders for portraits which rained in upon her; her
+charm of manner and her increasing beauty added to the pressure of the
+siege of her admirers.
+
+A little while before her fifteenth birthday her mother married again a
+young jeweller, of the name of Le Sèvre, a miserly fellow, who, under
+the pretext of taking them into the country, hired a little house at
+Chaillot, where they went with the girl for their Sundays; the thrifty
+stepfather planting its garden with the gay blossoms of the useful
+haricot-bean and the nasturtium.  He had a frugal mind.
+
+The petty tyrannies of the thrifty jeweller, his mean outlook on life,
+and his sordid aims, made of the habits and atmosphere of his class an
+even more uncongenial world for this brilliant girl to live in.
+Happily the pursuit of her art, and the friendship of that circle into
+which that art and her gifts and charming personality raised her,
+mitigated the tyranny of this sordid relationship.  And, to add to her
+relief, Madame Suzanne, wife of the sculptor, and a friend of her
+mother, would carry off the girl with her into the country; and it was
+during one of their walks at Marly that she met for the first time
+Marie Antoinette.
+
+On the 10th of May 1774, a month before Elizabeth Vigée's nineteenth
+birthday, King Louis the Fifteenth died of the small-pox--died without
+a friend, for he had dismissed the Du Barry in tears a short while
+before.  His body was hastily thrust into a coffin, and hurried at the
+trot through the darkness to St. Denis, for fear of attack from the
+sullen crowds that gathered to do it dishonour; so was he huddled away
+amongst the bones of the ancient kings of his race, unattended by the
+Court, and amidst the curses of his people.
+
+Louis the Sixteenth, son of Louis Fifteenth's only son, the dead
+Dauphin, ascended the throne of France in his twentieth year, a
+pure-minded, honourable young fellow, full of good intentions, and
+sincerely anxious for the well-being of his people; but of a diffident
+temper, timid, hesitating, and uncertain in decision, and under the
+influence of his young consort, the beautiful Queen Marie Antoinette,
+who had the imperious temper of her house, wedded to light and
+frivolous manners; she brought to her counsels a deplorable lack of
+judgment and a steadfast incompetence in knowledge of men.
+
+The good qualities of this young pair had been very well in private
+life; but France needed greater abilities for her guidance than the
+simple virtues.  It was a hideous part of the destiny of this young
+couple that they came to rule over a France that was passionately
+angered at the misdeeds of a king and his privileged class of nobles
+and clergy who had gone before them--of a class that had come unscathed
+through that reign, and were grown incapable of realising that they
+could not come unscathed through another.
+
+The Du Barry flown, and her precious trio of ministers with her, Louis
+recalled the crafty old schemer Maurepas to power from the banishment
+into which the Pompadour had sent him; but he otherwise began well by
+making Turgot his minister of finance.
+
+On the 25th of October in this 1774 that saw Louis Quinze and Marie
+Antoinette come to the throne of France, Elizabeth Vigée was elected to
+the Academy of St. Luke at nineteen years of age.
+
+She brought to her early successes a charming modesty and an utter
+absence of conceit or of pose that added greatly to her reputation, and
+paved the way to further honours.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD
+
+But early success was not to be without black care stepping into the
+triumphal car in her procession towards an early and wide fame of this
+charming and accomplished young woman of twenty.  Honours were easy.
+But the devil was in the machinery.
+
+Her family had lived in the Rue de Cléry, opposite the hotel Lubert;
+thence they had drifted to the Rue St. Honoré hard by the Palais Royal;
+they now returned to the Rue de Cléry to the hotel Lubert itself.  Here
+it chanced that Le Brun, the expert, carried on a lucrative traffic in
+pictures.  His gallery attracted the pretty artist, who could study
+there at leisure the works of the great masters that passed through.
+
+The two families soon became intimate.  Le Brun carefully weighing the
+great advantages that such a union could bring to him, but entangled by
+his engagement to marry the daughter of a Dutch dealer in pictures who
+lived opposite to him, and with whom he had considerable business in
+works of art, beat about as to how he could marry Elizabeth Vigée.  The
+girl was living in the splendour of a circle to which her family could
+not hope to aspire; the picture-dealer belonged to the middle-class in
+which her own family moved.  Any day she might marry out of that
+middle-class world into the world of fashion.  He saw that the girl
+moved in, and was happiest in, a great world to which he had not the
+key.  He had the ambition to belong to that world, though his
+common-sense might have told him that he never could do more than hang
+about its outer courts.  He was a calculating blackguard, a man of
+loose life, and a vulgar fellow with vulgar ambitions.  He saw astutely
+enough that this girl was well on the high-road to considerable
+fortune.  The Dutch girl opposite necessitated wary walking.  He played
+the romantic lover, and before six months were run out he was pressing
+his suit, asking Elizabeth Vigée to marry him secretly.
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE IV.--PORTRAIT OF MADAME VIGÉE LE BRUN
+
+(In the National Gallery, London)
+
+She saw at Anvers the famous "Chapeau de paille" by Rubens.  This
+canvas by Rubens clearly inspired her to the painting of the portrait
+of herself in a straw hat, where she stands bathed in the sunlight, her
+palette in her hand.  The painting of the flesh of the pretty face is
+exquisite, and in spite of intense finish is broadly conceived and rich
+and glowing in colour.  The clumsy drawing of the hand that holds the
+palette is the only defect in this, one of her masterpieces.  The
+picture has the added interest of revealing to us how Vigée Le Brun set
+her palette.  The thing is thrilling with life; and the little feminine
+conceit of wearing her black wrap is quaintly delightful.
+
+[Illustration: Plate IV.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+The girl seems to have had a presentiment of the misery that such a
+marriage would mean for her.  After long and serious hesitation she
+gave her consent.  It was perhaps due to a sense of being between the
+devil and the deep sea, for her sordid and miserly stepfather the
+jeweller must have been a sorry table-companion of her home life.  If
+she suspected the picture-dealer to be a rogue, she thought, likely
+enough, that the more genial rogue would be a pleasanter fellow to live
+with than the other.
+
+She married him secretly on the 11th of January 1776, on the edge of
+her twenty-first year.  It was not a wholly promising beginning, this
+that gave her the name that she was to immortalise--Vigée Le Brun.
+
+It was a sorry match.  It began in secrecy; she was to discover that it
+was founded on a treachery.  When the marriage was discovered it was
+too late to dissuade the girl from it; she had to listen to some plain
+home-truths as a Dutchman saw them, and to grim prophecies of the evil
+that would come of the business.  But he might have spared his breath.
+
+She was to have her ugly awakening.  She early discovered that Le Brun
+was a gambler, a rake, and a thoroughly dissolute and unscrupulous
+rogue.  It was not long before he had not only squandered his own
+fortune, but was playing ducks and drakes with every penny that she
+gained by her art and her untiring industry.
+
+She was soon to become a mother; the love that she had sedately allowed
+to go out to her disreputable and pretentious husband, and which she
+had early withdrawn in tatters, she now lavished upon this, her
+girl-child.
+
+Meanwhile, her reputation increased by leaps and bounds.  Her studio
+was simply besieged by "the Quality."  The Duchess of Orleans had to
+wait her turn a whole year before she could be painted.  Vigée Le
+Brun's praise was in every mouth.  She was sung in prose and verse; the
+poetasters ran to much doggerel of handsome intent, as was the fashion
+of the day.  Marquises and the rest of the scribbling folk tripped over
+halting feet to sing her charms and immortalise her art.  "L'orgueil de
+France" rhymed it to "la double puissance;" and "immortal crayon" to
+"admiration."  They spilled the rosy inks.  Le Brun, not the
+picture-dealing husband, but the poetical fellow who modestly nicknamed
+himself the Pindar of his age, plucked at the lyre with both hands in
+her honour.
+
+Nay, have we not the written record that Laharpe, uttering his rhymed
+discourse on the genius of women to a great gathering of the bloods and
+wits at the Academy, and bursting into violent poesies in announcing
+that Elizabeth, "the modern Rosalba, but more brilliant than she, weds
+the voice of Favart with the smiles of a Venus"--every one rose to
+their feet, "not omitting the Duchess of Chartres and the King of
+Sweden," and turning to the blushing Elizabeth, applauded her "with
+transports"!
+
+So much for France within the walls of the Royal Academy.  But France
+without!  The great minister, Turgot, baffled by the selfishness of the
+privileged classes, fell.  But Louis called to power near as good a
+man, worthy banker Neckar.  In an unfortunate hour for the Royal house,
+and against the will of the king, be it credited, and to the
+bewilderment of Neckar, the nation having gone mad with enthusiasm over
+the prospect of an alliance with Britain's revolted American colonies,
+war was declared against England, France undertaking not to conclude
+peace until the colonies were free.  The success of the revolted
+colonies made the Revolution in France a certainty.  The fall of Neckar
+and the setting up of the reckless and incompetent Calonne over the
+destinies of France brought the shout of the Democracy to the gardens
+of the king.  Vigée Le Brun's picture of the dandified man certainly
+does not show him a leader of great enterprises.  His reckless
+extravagance satisfied the nobles; it brought bankruptcy stalking to
+the doors of the king's palace.  The distress and sufferings of the
+people became unbearable.  The miserable scandal of the diamond
+necklace added to the discredit of the queen.  The Royal family and the
+Court sank further in the people's respect.
+
+As for Vigée Le Brun, she was come into her kingdom.  And it is during
+those twenty years, from shortly after her marriage until she was
+forty, that her best and most brilliant portraiture belongs, before the
+hardness and dryness of her later style showed signs of the decay of
+her powers.
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE V.--THE TWO ELDER CHILDREN OF MARIE ANTOINETTE--THE FIRST DAUPHIN
+(born 1781, died 1789) AND THE MADAME ROYALE
+
+(At Versailles)
+
+The little Dauphin of four years, and his seven-year-old sister, the
+Madame Royale, seated on a bank, the boy's hat thrown at his feet upon
+the flower-strewn ground--a work in which Vigée Le Brun's colour-sense,
+her fine arrangement, and her feeling for style reach to their highest
+flight.  The handsome boy was mercifully taken at the dawn of the
+Revolution; the girl was to know all its terrors.
+
+[Illustration: Plate V.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+To its earliest, freshest years belongs the first portrait that Vigée
+Le Brun painted, in her twenty-fourth year (1779) of Marie Antoinette,
+in which the young queen is seen with a large basket, and dressed in a
+satin gown, holding a rose in her hand--painted the year after the
+birth of her eldest child, the Madame Royale.  Here is no hint of the
+tragedy that was to overwhelm the handsome young daughter of Austria;
+all was as yet but gaiety and roses and sunshine and pleasant airs and
+the glamour that hovers about a throne.  But there are signs of the
+imperious temper of her house, combined with the levity and frivolity
+of manners, which were so early to make her unpopular.
+
+Vigée Le Brun was to paint her royal mistress close on thirty times
+during the next ten years, until the prison doors shut upon the Royal
+house of France; and there grew up between the two women a subtle and
+charming friendship that was to make the talented woman a dogged and
+convinced royalist to her dying day--indeed, the temperament of women
+needs small incense towards the worshipping of idols.
+
+Vigée Le Brun was rarely more happy in her art than in several of the
+many portraits she painted of herself about this time--more
+particularly the two famous pictures of herself with her little
+daughter.  "The Marie Antoinette with the Rose" is redolent still of
+the eighteenth-century France--the siècle Louis Quinze.  In Vigée Le
+Brun's portrait of herself and her child we see in full career the
+Greek ideals that were come upon France--a France weary of light
+trifling with life, and of mere butterfly flitting from flower to
+flower; here is that crying back to the antique spirit that was
+leavening the middle-class of France which was about to claim dominion
+over the land and to step to the foot of the throne and usurp the
+sceptre and diadem of her ancient line of kings as the Third Estate;
+and to come to power with violent upheaval, wading to the throne
+through blood and terror.  Here we see Vigée Le Brun, royalist,
+glorifying motherhood, her arms and shoulders bare in chaste nudity,
+her body scantily attired in the simple purity of Greek robes, her
+child in her embrace.
+
+Vigée Le Brun painted another portrait of herself and her little
+girl-child; and she painted both, fortunately for her fame, when her
+skill was at its increase.  They stand out, with all their limitations,
+pure and exquisite as the Madonna and Child of Italy's finest
+achievement; for they were painted by a woman of genius with the
+passionate love of a child that is the wondrous heritage of woman; none
+the less religious in that it apes no show of religion.  We see the age
+of free thought stating the innate religion of free thought; as
+Renaissance Italy painted paganism in religious disguise with the
+innate irreligion of its day.
+
+In all her portraiture one is struck by the fact that Vigée Le Brun
+took much pains to arrange the draperies in what she considered
+picturesque fashion rather than that she painted the ordinary gowns of
+her day as her sitters wore them on entering her studio.  And we have
+her own word for it in her _Souvenirs_ (wherein the careful record of
+each picture that she painted may be found) that the dress of most
+women of the time seemed ugly to her--as it does to so many artists,
+generally not the best, in all times--indeed, she used every ounce of
+tact that she possessed in order to "arrange" the draperies.  She
+sternly set her face against the use of powder and paint that the
+fashion of her century put upon complexions even of the most delicate
+beauties; and she always, when she could, arranged the hair of the
+women sitters.  She tells, not without pride, how, having persuaded the
+beautiful Duchess of Grammont-Caderousse to put off paint and powder,
+and to allow her to arrange her jet-black hair, drawing it down over
+the forehead and separating it over the brow and arranging it in
+irregular little curls, the duchess went to the theatre as she was, and
+created the fashion thereby, in spite of the fact that Vigée Le Brun
+could never persuade the queen to give in to her, Marie Antoinette
+replying to all her beguilings: "I shall be the last to follow the
+fashion; I do not wish them to say that I am trying to hide my huge
+forehead."
+
+Marie Antoinette was beginning to realise that all France did not fawn
+upon her with the courtier's bended shoulder or pretty speech.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+MARIE ANTOINETTE
+
+In her twenty-seventh year (1782) Vigée Le Brun made a journey into
+Flanders with her husband, who had gone thither picture-dealing.  The
+works of the Flemish masters that she there saw had a marked effect
+upon the increase of her art.
+
+She saw at Anvers the famous "Chapeau de paille" by Rubens; and had
+revealed to her the beauties of a sun-flooded figure, with the face
+painted in the golden glow of reflected lights under the shadow flung
+down over it by a large hat.  This canvas by Rubens clearly inspired
+her to the painting of the portrait of herself in a straw hat, where
+she stands bathed in the sunlight, her palette in her hand.  The
+painting of the flesh of the pretty face is exquisite, and in spite of
+intense finish is broadly conceived and rich and glowing in colour.
+The clumsy drawing of the hand that holds the palette is the only
+defect in this, one of her masterpieces.  The picture has the added
+interest of revealing to us how Vigée Le Brun set her palette.  The
+thing is thrilling with life; and the little feminine conceit of
+wearing her black wrap is quaintly delightful.
+
+Thenceforth her art has an added sense of style, a fuller statement of
+atmosphere; in her handling of paint and employment of colour she was
+soon to reach the very height of her achievement.
+
+It was shortly after her return from this journey into Flanders that
+Joseph Vernet decided to put down her name for election to the Royal
+Academy.  Her portrait of herself created such a sensation that her
+election became assured.  She had to paint the usual formal _tableau de
+reception_, and chose Allegory, painting her "La Paix ramenant
+l'Abondance," which, though a somewhat stilted affair such as Academies
+demand, is full of charm--and is still to be seen at the Louvre.  She
+was received into the Academy on the last day of May in 1783 in her
+twenty-eighth year, and thenceforward had the valuable privilege of the
+right to show at the Salon.
+
+Vigée Le Brun had not reached to such rapid and wide success, in spite
+of all her charm and youth and the defence that chivalry should grant
+to her sex, without setting jealous tongues wagging.  The "Peace
+bringing back Abundance" happened to be hung under a canvas by
+Ménageot, "The Birth of the Dauphin"; and comparisons between the two
+pictures were aimed at creating a slander which there were only too
+many ready to believe; for it was supported by certain facts which fell
+into place, and took on a suspicious air when pointed to as supporting
+evidence.  This Ménageot, who afterwards became Director of the Academy
+at Rome, lived in the same house as Vigée Le Brun; and rumour soon got
+agog to the effect that he was in the habit of painting, or at any rate
+putting the finishing touches to, her work, Pierre, at this time first
+painter to the king, had employed this slander in order to oppose her
+election to the Academy; he was the leading spirit of a cabal against
+her, as soon became known; for he was the victim soon afterwards of a
+satirical jingle that went the round of the studios.
+
+She was harassed also by the petty spites of enemies who did not
+hesitate to try and have her studio seized under the charge that she
+was painting without legal title since she had never been apprenticed
+to a painter.  And malignant tongues whispered it abroad that she never
+would have been elected to the Academy had it not been done at the
+command of the Court.  They made her very friendship with the queen a
+whip with which to lash at her.  She was now painting many portraits of
+the queen.
+
+Vigée Le Brun spent her entire day at her easel, from the time she
+arose in the morning, and she rose early, until the daylight went.  She
+gave up dining in the town, in order not to be drawn away from her
+work; and the temptation must have been strong for a young and charming
+woman so greatly in request.  But at nightfall she went out to social
+functions, and herself received the most brilliant and distinguished
+members of society and art and letters at her own house, giving
+concerts where Grétry, whose portrait she painted, and other celebrated
+musicians played portions of their operas before they were seen or
+heard upon the stage; whilst the grandees of the old noblesse and the
+famous wits frequented her house.
+
+Again, the report of her receptions got noised abroad; and envious
+tongues were soon exaggerating the extravagance and luxury in which she
+lived, descending to such childish tittle-tattle as that she lit her
+fires with bank-notes, that the number of her guests was so great and
+so distinguished that, for lack of seats, the marshals of France had to
+sit upon the floor; gossip and babble that were to cost her dearer than
+she thought, though she laughed it all away with a shrug of her pretty
+shoulders at the time.  It was concerning one of her six-o'clock
+suppers that a slander was started which was to be a serious menace to
+her in after years.
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE VI.--PORTRAIT OF MADAME MOLÉ-RAYMOND
+
+(In the Louvre)
+
+This famous painting of Madame Molé-Raymond, the pretty actress of the
+Comédie Française, is one of Vigée Le Brun's masterpieces.  Her brush
+is now at its most dexterous use; the laughing pretty woman is caught
+like a live thing and fixed upon the canvas as at a stroke as she trips
+across the vision, with muff upraised, smiling out upon us as she
+passes.  Vigée Le Brun never stated character with more consummate
+skill than here; never set down action with more vivid brush, catching
+movement flying.
+
+[Illustration: Plate VI.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+It was an age of small oratory.  Every man who could string a neat
+sentence together, scribbled or harangued.  It was boorish and an
+unfashionable thing not to be an author, a poetaster, a little orator,
+a critic, a dabbler in the arts.  At coffee-houses or clubs,
+wheresoever men foregathered, some fellow would mount a table and
+harangue his friends.  The bloods caught the vogue, little foreseeing
+that it made a hotbed for the airing of discontents, and for the
+parading of ideals which alone could blot out those discontents.  All
+took to it like ducks to the village pond.  There was much quackery;
+some honest noise.
+
+Now it so chanced that at Vigée Le Brun's there was a gathering at
+which Le Brun--"Pindar" Le Brun the poet--spouting a discourse,
+described a Greek supper.  The idea at once sprang up that they should
+have one straightway; they got up the cook and started to set the thing
+going, the poet guiding the making of the sauces.  Amidst the general
+merriment Vigée Le Brun suggested that they should dress for the
+fantastic affair in Greek costume, and arrange the tables and seats
+after the antique fashion.  So the jocular business went apace.  It was
+a merry party of Athenians that sat down to the feast--"Pindar" Le Brun
+wearing laurels in his ridiculous hair, and a purple mantle round about
+him; the Marquis de Cubières tricked out with a guitar as a golden
+lyre; Vigée Le Brun being chief costumier to the frolic, draping
+Chaudet the sculptor and others in as near Greek fashion as could be.
+Vigée Le Brun, herself in white robes and tunic, and garlanded with
+flowers and veiled, seems to have presided over a rollicking gathering.
+The noise of the jollification got abroad.
+
+The banquet cost the frugal Vigée Le Brun some fifteen francs in all;
+but in the mouths of the spiteful the tale of its extravagance quickly
+grew.  A few days afterwards there was talk of it at Court; and the
+king was solemnly assured by "one who knew," that it had cost 20,000
+francs.
+
+This unfortunate Greek supper dogged her steps in the wanderings over
+the face of Europe that were to be her long exile.  At Rome she was to
+discover that it had cost her 40,000 francs; at Vienna it was to rise
+to 60,000; and when she reached St. Petersburg she was to find that,
+gathering volume on the long journey, it had increased to 80,000
+francs, when she scotched the lie and killed it; but not before it had
+served her a very ugly turn.
+
+The truth was that she was being made to share the unpopularity that
+had fallen upon the queen.  She was painting, and was on friendly terms
+with, not only the Royal Family, but with the unpopular ministers and
+servants of the crown, and with the noblesse, who in league with the
+queen were chiefly concerned in keeping the king from popular measures.
+She painted, according to the authorities, in 1785, in her thirtieth
+year, the portrait of Calonne though a parchment in the engraving from
+it bears the date 1787.  The portrait of the minister set slander going
+against the artist, as regards the vast sum paid for it.  The portrait
+of the seated minister ends below the knees; and it was of this picture
+of the weak Calonne, who clung so limpet-like to office, that Sophie
+Arnould, seeing it at the Salon, made the neat remark: "It is because
+he sticks to office that Madame Le Brun has cut off his legs."  But
+whether she received much or little mattered not much to Vigée Le Brun;
+her husband seized and squandered all she earned.  As a matter of fact,
+she received 3600 francs for the portrait from Calonne, sent in a
+handsome box worth 1200 francs--a couple of hundred pounds at the
+outside.  It was a small price compared to the sums she was now
+receiving for portraits; Beaujou, the financier, paid 8000 francs (say
+300 guineas); Prince Lubomirski 20,000 francs (£800)--not that the poor
+maker of these works gained thereby, for her precious picture-dealer
+husband had it according to his habit, and she had difficulty and a
+scene even to get two louis from the price when she asked the rogue for
+it.  However, her reputation ever increased.  She showed at this same
+Salon of 1785, in her thirtieth year, the portrait of the little
+Dauphin of four years and his seven-year-old sister, the Madame Royale,
+seated on a bank, the boy's hat thrown at his feet upon the
+flower-strewn ground--a work in which her colour-sense, her fine
+arrangement, and her feeling for style reach to their highest flight.
+It is perhaps the most wholly successful and most complete and masterly
+canvas of her long career.  It hangs in Versailles, a pathetic comment,
+this happy moment in the children's life, when the days looked rosy and
+all the world was a beautiful garden.
+
+At the Salon of 1787, in her thirty-second year, is record of a picture
+of "Marie Antoinette and her Children"; and of herself with her girl;
+and, amongst others, those of Mademoiselle Dugazon and of Madame
+Molé-Raymond.  This famous painting of Madame Molé-Raymond, the pretty
+actress of the Comédie Française, is one of Vigée Le Brun's
+masterpieces.  Her brush is now at its most dexterous use; the laughing
+pretty woman is caught like a live thing and fixed upon the canvas as
+at a stroke as she trips across the vision, with muff upraised, smiling
+out upon us as she passes.  Vigée Le Brun never stated character with
+more consummate skill than here; never set down action with more vivid
+brush, catching movement flying; she never stated life more truly nor
+with more exquisite tact than in this bright vision of a dainty woman
+of the theatre.
+
+Affairs in France were now in such a huddle that the State could not
+pay interest on the public loans.  Calonne could no longer disguise the
+serious business from himself or the king.  There was nothing for it
+but to call the Assembly of Notables.  They met at Versailles on the
+22nd of February 1787.  Calonne fell, to give place to his enemy the
+turbulent and stupid Cardinal de Brienne.  The Court was completely
+foul of the people when De Brienne threw up office in the midst of
+riots in Paris and throughout the country, and, in panic, fled to
+Italy, leaving the Government in dire confusion and distress.
+
+The king took a wise course; he recalled Neckar.  The convoking of the
+States-General now became a certainty.  Paris rang with the hoarse cry
+for the Third Estate.  The wrangle as to the constitution of the
+States-General became every day more dangerous.
+
+The last portrait that Vigée Le Brun painted of the doomed queen was
+the canvas that hangs at Versailles known as "Marie Antoinette and her
+Children," in which the queen is seen seated beside a cradle with the
+baby Duke of Normandy on her knee, the little Madame Royale at her
+side, and the small Dauphin pointing into the cradle.  When the doors
+of the Salon of 1788 were thrown open the painting was not quite
+finished; and for some days the frame reserved for it remained empty.
+It was on the eve of what was to become the Revolution, and the country
+was speaking now in no hushed whispers of the public deficit in the
+nation's treasury, and gazing bewildered at the bankruptcy that
+threatened the land.  The empty frame drew forth the bitter jest:
+"Voilà le déficit!"  The little Dauphin's pointing at the cradle was
+not to be without its significance--for the little fellow was to die at
+the outbreak of the Revolution and his place was to be taken by the
+babe on his mother's knee--the small Duke of Normandy was to become
+Dauphin in his place, and, in some few years, with his little sister,
+was to be made a close prisoner in the Temple.  The king and the queen,
+separated from their children and each other, were to go out to the
+guillotine; the girl was to live through the seething hell of the
+Terror as by a miracle, and thereafter unhappily enough as the Duchess
+of Angoulême; but the fair boy, heir to one of the noblest heritages in
+all this vast world, torn from Marie Antoinette whilst the queen still
+lived, a prisoner, was to be handed to the tender mercies of the
+infamous Simon, jailor at the Temple, who was to train the frightened
+child to drink and swear and sing with piping treble the _camagnole_,
+until, hidden away in a tower of the prison, he was to die like a
+frightened hunted thing, his shirt not changed for months--die in
+darkness and squalor and in a filthy state.  The guillotine did no
+mightier act of simple godlike vengeance than the day it sheared the
+skull from the foul neck of cordwainer Simon.
+
+Marie Antoinette, in this the thirtieth portrait that Vigée Le Brun
+painted of her, is no longer the mere careless, gorgeous butterfly of
+some ten years ago when the little more than girl-artist first limned
+her features in the "Marie Antoinette with a Rose."  The ten years that
+have passed are ending in solemn seriousness for the thirty-third
+birthday of the French Queen.  The future is a threat.  The people are
+demanding rule by Parliament--are singing for it--writing broadsheets
+claiming it.
+
+It was about this time of stress and strain and anxiety at Court that,
+in 1788, Berger engraved so superbly one of Vigée Le Brun's greatest
+portraits, the consummately painted character-study, and exquisitely
+dainty colour-harmony of the Marchioness de Sabran.
+
+The elections to the States-General took place amidst indescribable
+excitement throughout all France.  The winter which went before the
+meeting of the States-General was terribly severe; it came on top of a
+bad harvest; the price of bread rose to famine pitch.  Neckar
+generously sacrificed a vast part of his private fortune to buy food
+for the hunger-stricken poor of Paris.  It was in national gloom that
+the States-General met at Versailles on the 5th of May in 1789.  That
+day sounded the knell of the Monarchy.
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE VII.-MARIE ANTOINETTE AND HER CHILDREN
+
+(At Versailles)
+
+The last portrait that Vigée Le Brun painted of the doomed queen was
+the canvas that hangs at Versailles known as "Marie Antoinette and her
+Children," in which the queen is seen seated beside a cradle with the
+baby Duke of Normandy on her knee, the little Madame Royale at her
+side, and the small Dauphin pointing into the cradle.  When the doors
+of the Salon of 1788 were thrown open the painting was not quite
+finished; and for some days the frame reserved for it remained empty.
+It was on the eve of what was to become the Revolution, and the country
+was speaking now in no hushed whispers of the public deficit in the
+nation's treasury, and gazing bewildered at the bankruptcy that
+threatened the land.  The empty frame drew forth the bitter jest:
+"Voilà, le déficit!"
+
+[Illustration: Plate VII.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+In little over a month the States-General was become the
+self-constituted National Assembly; a few days later, on the 20th of
+June, the deputies took the solemn oath in the tennis-court--the _jeu
+de paume_.  At the queen's foolish urging the king fell back on force;
+filled Paris with troops under De Broglie; dismissed Neckar.  The
+people at once took to arms.  The 14th of July saw the fall of the
+hated Bastille.  On the 22nd the people hanged Foulon to the
+street-lamp at the corner of the Place de Grève--and thenceforth the
+terrible shout _à la lanterne!_ became the cry of fashion.
+
+Such was the dawn of the Revolution in the streets of Paris, upon which
+Vigée Le Brun's eyes gazed down terrified in her thirty-fourth year.
+
+Quickly followed the rumblings of the dark thunder-clouds that came up
+in threatening blackness behind the dawn--and which were about to burst
+with a roar upon reckless Paris.
+
+The king showed astounding courage and considerable capacity during
+these awful days; but his work was constantly thwarted and ruined by
+the Court party and the queen.  On the 3rd of October the officers of
+the regiment of Flanders were foolishly entertained at Versailles, and
+the whole Court being present, the white cockade of the Bourbons was
+distributed amidst rapturous approval, and the national tricolour
+trodden under foot.  The starving rabble of Paris knew it, by the next
+day; and headed by a band of frantic women, set out for Versailles on
+the morning of the 5th of October, under the leadership of the ruffian
+Maillard who had distinguished himself at the capture of the Bastille.
+They overran the palace.  The king again showed superb nerve; and the
+mob, abashed and admiring, calling "Long live the king!" withdrew to
+the courtyards.  The unfortunate brawl in the courtyard followed; and
+the mishap of the night.  The next day the Royal Family had to make
+their humiliating journey with the rabble to Paris.
+
+Small hope for Vigée Le Brun, unless she stole out of France, and at
+once.  She stood, indeed, in perilous plight.  Her relations with the
+Court, and with the nobility, made every hour that she stayed in Paris
+a greater danger to her life.  It was dangerous to go into the
+streets--dangerous to leave Paris--but for Vigée Le Brun more dangerous
+to stay.  She was a marked woman.  There was for her one sole way from
+death, and it was flight.  By delaying she risked also the life of her
+child.  Her friends begged her to be gone.  She took the girl; searched
+hurriedly for all the money she could lay hands on--her husband had
+taken all but eighty francs (some three guineas)--and, leaving her
+canvases where they stood unfinished, she passed out of the studio that
+had been all the world to her; the place where she had spent the
+happiest hours of her life.  A few days before, she had had to refuse
+to begin a portrait of the future Duchess de Noailles--to save her own
+head, not to paint those of others, was now become her single aim.
+
+On the 5th of October of this year of 1789, that fearsome day that saw
+the rabble marching to Versailles, Vigée Le Brun took her seat in a
+diligence with her little girl, seated between a thief and a jacobin;
+the diligence rattled along the cobbles of her beloved city, and out of
+the gates--in such fashion Vigée Le Brun left Paris and took the road
+for Italy.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+SWEET EXILE
+
+As she rattled out of Paris between her grim companions, Vigée Le Brun
+little thought that her exile would last a dozen years; but everywhere
+she went she was destined to be welcomed with honour; and wheresoever
+she roamed--and she ranged across the face of the land wellnigh from
+end to end of it--she was to receive the same ovations, meet with the
+same success, be rewarded with the highest honours.
+
+She went amongst strangers with but eighty francs in her purse out of
+all the fortune she had made by her dogged industry; she was to find in
+exile, not only a gracious home, but at last an immunity from the
+shameless squandering of her earnings by the disreputable thief whom
+she had married.
+
+At Turin, her first halting-place, she tarried but a short while.  She
+found that her name and fame had gone before her.  At Bologna no French
+citizen was allowed to stay for more than twenty-four hours; but for
+Vigée Le Brun permission was brought without her asking for it.  She
+spent three days gazing at the masterpieces of the Bologna School; and
+was made a member of its Academy.
+
+At Florence she was asked to paint her portrait for the celebrated
+collection of portraits of famous artists by their own hand at the
+Uffizi Gallery.
+
+At Rome the same impressive welcome awaited her.
+
+Here she was soon at work again, with palette and brushes, upon the
+portrait of herself, which she had promised to the Gallery at Florence,
+where it now hangs--one of the most exquisite heads she ever painted,
+sunny, smiling, happy, with youth come back to it.
+
+After eight months in Rome she moved on to Naples.  Here it was that
+she painted the portrait of Lady Hamilton, Nelson's Emma, reclining by
+the sea, holding a cup in her hand as a Bacchante.  Vigée Le Brun also
+painted her as a Sibyl--that picture which she took with her wherever
+she went, from town to town, and which always drew a crowd to her
+studio; whilst, grimly enough, Nelson's Emma rose to be one of the
+famed lovers of romance, to sink into want, and so to death in
+loneliness and misery at Calais.
+
+It was at Naples, too, that Vigée Le Brun painted that portrait of
+Paisiello which she sent to Paris to the Salon, where it was hung as
+pendant to a portrait by David, and led to his high tribute to her
+genius, when, after gazing upon it for a long while, he said to his
+pupils: "They will think that my canvas was painted by a woman, and the
+portrait of Paisiello by a man."
+
+Vigée Le Brun was now painting without cease.  The Queen of Naples, her
+two elder daughters, and the Prince Royal, all sat to her.
+
+During the first year of her exile the news from France had not been
+greatly alarming, and danger seemed to have been lulled.  But at Naples
+she was to hear tidings that caused her bitter grief.  First Neckar,
+finding himself out of touch with the king and the people and the
+Parliament, retired to Switzerland.  Then, unfortunately for the king,
+Mirabeau died in the April of 1791.  The king thenceforth resolved on
+escape.  The Royal Family made their ill-starred flight to Varennes; to
+be brought back to Paris as prisoners.  The constitutional party in the
+Legislative Assembly, at first dominant, soon became subordinate to the
+more violent Girondists, with their extreme wing of _Jacobins_ under
+Robespierre and of _Cordeliers_ under Danton, Marat, Camille
+Desmoulins, and Fabre d'Eglantine.  The Proscription of all emigrants
+quickly followed--and the name of Vigée Le Brun was written upon the
+lists.  The queen's enmity to Lafayette baulked, and completed the ruin
+of, the Royalist hopes.  He retired into exile, and sadly left the
+Royal cause to its fate.  On the 20th of April 1792 France entered upon
+her supreme struggle with Europe by declaring war.  On the night of the
+9th of August the dread tocsin sounded the note of doom to the Royal
+cause--herald to the bloodshed of the 10th of August.  Three days
+afterwards the king and the Royal Family were prisoners in the Temple.
+There followed the terrible September massacres.
+
+The National Convention met for the first time on the 21st of September
+1792; decreed the first year of the Republic; abolished royalty and
+titles of courtesy; decreed _citoyen_ and _citoyenne_ in their place,
+and _tu_ and _toi_ for _vous_.  It also proved the enmity of the two
+wings of the now all-powerful Girondist party--the Girondists proper as
+against the _Jacobins_ or _Montagnards_.  The conflict began with the
+fierce quarrel as to whether the king could be tried.
+
+
+It was with sorrow at her heart that the exiled artist left Italy and
+journeyed into Austria.  Having spent three years in Italy, roaming
+from town to town, and being received with honour wherever she went,
+she turned her footsteps to Vienna, where she remained from 1792 to
+1795, her thirty-seventh to her fortieth years, again to be idolised,
+and painting hard the while.  "To paint and to live are the same word
+to me," she was wont to say.
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE VIII.--PEACE BRINGING BACK PLENTY
+
+(In the Louvre)
+
+It was shortly after her return from this journey into Flanders that
+Joseph Vernet decided to put down her name for election to the Royal
+Academy.  Her portrait of herself created such a sensation that her
+election became assured.  She had to paint the usual formal _tableau de
+reception_, and chose Allegory, painting her "La Paix ramenant
+l'Abondance," which, though a somewhat stilted affair such as Academies
+demand, is full of charm--and is still to be seen at the Louvre.
+
+[Illustration: Plate VIII.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+But these years in Vienna must have gnawed at Vigée Le Brun's heart
+like a fearful disease.  In her France her much-loved Marie Antoinette
+was going through terrible days.  The king was being tried for his
+life, and "Louis Capet" knew that he was a condemned man before he
+faced his accusers with the rare dignity and courage that keep his
+memory green.  He was condemned to death,--Orleans, "Philip Egalité,"
+voting with the majority amidst a murmur of universal horror even
+amongst the men who condemned the king.  Louis' head fell to the
+guillotine on the 10th of January 1793.  War with Europe followed; and
+the deadly struggle between the Girondists and Jacobins for supreme
+power.  The 27th of May saw the appointment of the terrible Secret
+Committee of Public Safety.  By June the Girondists had fallen.
+Charlotte Corday's stabbing Marat in his bath left the way clear to
+Robespierre's ambition.  The Jacobins in power, the year of the Reign
+of Terror set in--from July 1793 to July 1794, with Robespierre as lord
+of the hellish turmoil.  The famous "Loi des suspects" soon filled the
+prisons with some two hundred thousand miserable prisoners.  The
+scaffold reeked with blood.  During the year of the Terror the
+guillotine sheared the heads from fourteen hundred victims.
+
+The unfortunate queen, Marie Antoinette, whose hair had gone white in a
+night, was tried as "the widow Capet," going to the guillotine with
+majestic serenity on the 16th of October 1793.  The Girondist deputies
+followed; also the despicable Egalité Orleans, who went to his doom as
+the dandy he was, blotting out his many sins in a final dignity.
+Amongst the many batches came the miserable Du Barry, shrieking with
+terror, to her awful death, which she had brought upon herself by
+foolishly advertising a reward for a robbery from her house of
+Louveciennes.
+
+Then came strife amongst the Jacobins themselves.  Danton and
+Robespierre fought the bloodthirsty villain Hébert for life, and
+overthrew him; the Hébertists went to the guillotine like the curs they
+were.  Danton, with his appeals for cessation of the Terror, alone now
+stood between Robespierre and supreme power; Danton, Camille
+Desmoulins, d'Eglantine, and their fellows went to the guillotine.
+
+But other as able and resolute men had determined that Robespierre and
+his Terror must end; Robespierre went to the guillotine.  The
+Revolution of the Ninth Thermidor put an end to the Terror in July 1794.
+
+It was whilst at Vienna, in her thirty-ninth year, on the 3rd of June
+1794, during the Terror, that Vigée Le Brun took out her act of
+divorce.  And it was in this year that "citizen Le Brun" published in
+Paris his _Précis historique de la vie de la citoyenne Le Brun,
+peintre_!
+
+In her fortieth year Vigée Le Brun went from Vienna to Prague; and,
+getting roaming again, passed through Dresden to Berlin and on to St.
+Petersburg, where she arrived in the July of this same year of 1795.
+
+Her welcome in St. Petersburg must have been very sweet to the
+wandering exile.  On the morrow of her arrival the Empress Catherine
+had her presented.  She found at St. Petersburg many of her old
+friends, fled from the Revolution.
+
+To her all Europe became a second country; but St. Petersburg her
+second home.  Here, in fact, were larger numbers of those that had
+meant Paris to her than she could now have found in Paris itself.  She
+was besides a spoiled child of the Court.
+
+Her life at St. Petersburg was a very busy one.  She settled down at
+once to the industrious practice of that art that was breath and life
+and holiday to her--working from morning until nightfall, and happy in
+it all.  She painted something like forty-eight portraits in St.
+Petersburg.  The Empress Catherine, now an old woman, was to have sat
+to her, and had appointed the day and hour, but her "to-day at eight"
+was not to be; apoplexy struck down her good-will; she was found dead
+in her room.  The six years in St. Petersburg were amongst the happiest
+years of the artist's life, and the richest for her fortunes.  Her
+reception into the Academy of St. Petersburg was almost a State triumph.
+
+Meanwhile, the armies of France were winning the respect of the world
+by their gallantry and skill in war.  The 23rd of September 1795 saw
+France ruled by the Directory.  The 5th of October, the "Day of the
+Sections," led to Napoleon Bonaparte's employment as second in command
+of the army--the young general was soon commander-in-chief.  And France
+thenceforth advanced, with all the genius of her race to that splendid
+and astounding recovery of her fortunes and to that greatness which
+became the wonder of the world.
+
+The Revolution of the 18th and 19th of Brumaire (9th and 10th November
+1799) ended the Directory and set the people's idol, Napoleon
+Bonaparte, at the helm of her mighty State as First Consul.
+
+There was now little need--indeed there had not been for some time any
+need--for Vigée Le Brun to remain an exile; but, as a matter of fact,
+exile she had found to be so sweet a thing, so magnificent and
+perpetual a triumph, so delightful an existence, that Paris had early
+ceased to call her.  Her experience with her rascally husband scarcely
+beckoned her back to her old home; she was now sole mistress of her
+considerable earnings.  Besides, the Paris of her delight had been the
+Paris of Marie Antoinette--aristocratic Paris.  Where was that Paris to
+be found?  The personages and the atmosphere and the palaces and homes
+of all that Paris meant to her were gone into thin air--a sad memory.
+During her exile her mother had died; her last link with Paris died
+with her.  She probably rarely gave the city of her youth's delight a
+thought, and likely enough never would have given it another serious
+one, had not destiny now struck her a blow which she bitterly resented;
+but which she should have foreseen to be as inevitable as death.  Her
+daughter betrothed herself to, and married, a Russian, M. Nigris,
+secretary to the Count Czernicheff.  Vigée Le Brun had been sorely
+tempted to oppose the match, for she foresaw that the girl would find
+no happiness in the union.  She had poured out upon her child all the
+passionate love that had been so miserably thwarted in her own
+marriage.  It had been more than bitterness to her to note that whilst
+her love for her girl increased, the girl's love for her seemed to
+dwindle.  It was the bitterest blow that Vigée Le Brun had ever known;
+and she had been struck more than once.  It turned the wanderer's eyes
+homewards to her wrecked Paris.  Russia was no longer a delight to her.
+She became restless.  The wander-fever came upon her; she got roaming;
+she went to Moscow for five or six months; but she could not
+settle--she decided to leave Russia.
+
+The people amongst whom she had lived so long showed their affection,
+and personally appealed to her to make her home amongst them.  The
+grandees went to her and told her of the sorrow that the news of her
+going had brought to them.  The Emperor Alexander the First, himself,
+begged her not to leave them.  She fenced all their kindnesses by
+promising to return soon.  But during the forty years that remained to
+her she never set foot again in her "second home."
+
+In her forty-sixth year Vigée Le Brun left Russia, and turned her face
+towards Paris; she crossed the border into Germany and halted a short
+while in Berlin to paint a few portraits, and in order to go to Potsdam
+to paint the Queen of Prussia.  On leaving Berlin she narrowly escaped
+losing her diamonds and gold, a servant of the inn making an attempt to
+force open the baggage that contained them.  From Berlin she roamed to
+Dresden, where she seems to have hesitated, reluctant to bend her steps
+towards Paris, yet torn with desire to go.  As she came nearer to
+France her desire to return conflicted with her horror at the memories
+which the tragedy and wreckage of the Terror raised like ghouls in her
+imagination--every well-loved spot would now bear witness to her of the
+ghastly crimes that had swept away her old friends, their once masters
+and mistresses.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE END
+
+At last, the year after Napoleon, with great pomp, took up his official
+residence as First Consul at the palace of the Tuileries, Vigée Le Brun
+set foot on French soil after twelve years splendid exile, carrying
+with her a considerable fortune.
+
+The egregious Le Brun seems to have been reconciled, for he took a
+leading part in her reception. As she stepped out of the carriage she
+found herself in the arms of her brother and his wife, amidst tears of
+joy--with Le Brun in attendance.  In her home, which was gay with
+flowers, everything else was exactly as she had left it, except that
+above her bed was a crown of golden stars set there by "citizen Le
+Brun."  The long-suffering Vigée Le Brun was deeply touched; but could
+not forget that the unconscious wag had made her pay dearly for the
+golden stars.
+
+Concerts and ovations greeted the returned exile; but it was all a
+strange world.  A few old friends--and the rest, kindly strangers.  She
+grew restless, and in six months was setting out for London.  Here she
+found herself amongst hosts of old friends; and the doors of the great,
+as everywhere, thrown open to her.  She painted George the Fourth and
+Byron amongst many others.  The rage for portraits by her kept her in
+England for three years; and it was her fiftieth year (1805) before she
+returned by way of Holland and Belgium into France.
+
+But in the midst of the great sea of adventure that swept France along
+under Napoleon she seems never to have got her bearings.  She roamed to
+Switzerland twice, and painted some two hundred pastel landscapes of
+its scenery.  It was during her first visit thereto that she met and
+painted Madame de Staël as "Corinne."
+
+The years were increasing, the fever for travel cooled, and Vigée Le
+Brun, buying a house at Louveciennes, thenceforth passed her days
+between her country-house and town-mansion.
+
+Death began to make gaps amongst such old friendships as the guillotine
+had spared to her.  Le Brun died in 1813; her daughter in 1819; her
+brother the following year.  Her art began to fail her.  But her
+closing years were illumined by the affection and care of her two
+nieces, Madame de Rivière and Madame Trippier le Franc.
+
+At five of the morning of the 30th of March in 1842, she died in her
+apartment at No.  29 Rue St.  Lazare, in her eighty-seventh year; and
+was buried according to her wish at Louveciennes, where, in the church,
+still hangs the picture of "Ste.  Genevieve" painted by her.  Even her
+poor dead body could not sleep where she had willed; she was destined
+to gentle exile even after death.  Her remains were moved to the new
+cemetery, and the simple tomb was again set up over them, whereon one
+may see a palette and brushes chiselled at its summit, and the grim
+words: "Here, at last, I rest."
+
+
+
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.
+
+
+
+
+
+  IN THE SAME SERIES
+
+  ARTIST.                    AUTHOR.
+
+  VELAZQUEZ.                 S. L. BENSUSAN.
+  REYNOLDS.                  S. L. BENSUSAN.
+  TURNER.                    C. LEWIS HIND.
+  ROMNEY.                    C. LEWIS HIND.
+  GREUZE.                    ALYS EYRE MACKLIN.
+  BOTTICELLI.                HENRY B. BINNS.
+  ROSSETTI.                  LUCIEN PISSARRO.
+  BELLINI.                   GEORGE HAY.
+  FRA ANGELICO.              JAMES MASON.
+  REMBRANDT.                 JOSEF ISRAELS.
+  LEIGHTON.                  A. LYS BALDRY.
+  RAPHAEL.                   PAUL G. KONODY.
+  HOLMAN HUNT.               MARY E. COLERIDGE.
+  TITIAN.                    S. L. BENSUSAN.
+  CARLO DOLCI.               GEORGE HAY.
+  LUINI.                     JAMES MASON.
+  TINTORETTO.                S. L. BENSUSAN.
+
+  _Others in Preparation._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Vigée Le Brun, by Haldane MacFall
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Vigée Le Brun, by Haldane MacFall
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Vigée Le Brun
+
+Author: Haldane MacFall
+
+Release Date: October 22, 2009 [EBook #30314]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIGÉE LE BRUN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-cover"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-cover.jpg" ALT="Cover art" BORDER="" WIDTH="364" HEIGHT="564">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4>
+MASTERPIECES<BR>
+IN COLOUR<BR>
+EDITED BY &mdash;<BR>
+T. LEMAN HARE<BR>
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3>
+VIGÉE LE BRUN
+<BR>
+1755-1842
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+PLATE I.&mdash;MARIE ANTOINETTE.  Frontispiece
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+(At Versailles)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+The first portrait that Vigée Le Brun painted, in her twenty-fourth
+year (1779) of Marie Antoinette.  Here is no hint of the tragedy that
+was to overwhelm the handsome young daughter of Austria; all was as yet
+but gaiety and roses and sunshine and pleasant airs, and the glamour
+that hovers about a throne.  But there are signs of the imperious
+temper of her house, combined with the levity and frivolity of manners
+which were so early to make her unpopular.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-frontt"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<A HREF="images/img-front.jpg">
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-frontt.jpg" ALT="Plate I." BORDER="2" WIDTH="576" HEIGHT="747">
+</A>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+Vigée Le Brun
+</H1>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+BY HALDANE MACFALL
+</H2>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT
+<BR>
+REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-title"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-title.jpg" ALT="Title page art" BORDER="" WIDTH="285" HEIGHT="263">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+LONDON: T. C. &amp; E. C. JACK
+<BR>
+NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.
+<BR>
+1907
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+CONTENTS
+</H2>
+
+<TABLE ALIGN="center" WIDTH="80%">
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">I.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap01">The Beginnings</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">II.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap02">The Wonderful Child</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">III.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap03">Marriage and Motherhood</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">IV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap04">Marie Antoinette</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">V.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap05">Sweet Exile</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap06">The End</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+</TABLE>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+</H2>
+
+<TABLE ALIGN="center" WIDTH="80%">
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">Plate</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">I.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-frontt">
+Marie Antoinette
+</A><BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;         <SPAN STYLE="font-size: 80%">
+         At Versailles
+</SPAN>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">Frontispiece</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">II.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-014t">
+Madame Vigée Le Brun and Child
+</A><BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;         <SPAN STYLE="font-size: 80%">
+         In the Louvre
+</SPAN>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">III.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-024t">
+Madame Vigée Le Brun and Child
+</A><BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;         <SPAN STYLE="font-size: 80%">
+         In the Louvre
+</SPAN>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">IV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-034t">
+Portrait of Madame Vigée Le Brun
+</A><BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;         <SPAN STYLE="font-size: 80%">
+         In the National Gallery, London
+</SPAN>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">V.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-040t">
+The two elder Children of Marie Antoinette
+</A><BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;         <SPAN STYLE="font-size: 80%">
+         At Versailles
+</SPAN>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-050t">
+Portrait of Madame Molé-Raymond
+</A><BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;         <SPAN STYLE="font-size: 80%">
+         In the Louvre
+</SPAN>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-014t">
+Marie Antoinette and her Children
+</A><BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;         <SPAN STYLE="font-size: 80%">
+         At Versailles
+</SPAN>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VIII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-070t">
+Peace bringing back Plenty
+</A><BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;         <SPAN STYLE="font-size: 80%">
+         In the Louvre
+</SPAN>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+</TABLE>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+
+<A NAME="img-011"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-011.jpg" ALT="Vigée Le Brun" BORDER="" WIDTH="262" HEIGHT="253">
+</CENTER>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+I
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE BEGINNINGS
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+In Paris, in the Rue Coquillière, Louis the Fifteenth being King of
+France&mdash;or rather the Pompadour holding sway thereover&mdash;there lived a
+witty, amiable fellow who plied the art of painting portraits in oils
+and pastels after the mediocre fashion that is called "pleasing." This
+Louis Vigée and his wife, Jeanne Maissin, moved in the genial
+enthusiastic circle of the lesser artists, passing through their sober
+day without undue excitement; for fame and wealth and the prizes of
+life were not for them.  Boucher was lord of art; and La Tour and
+Greuze and Chardin were at the height of their genius; but honest Louis
+Vigée could but plod on at his pleasing portraits, and sigh that the
+gods had not borne to him the immortal flame.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet he was to come near to the glory of it&mdash;nearer than he thought.
+'Twas a pity that he was robbed of the splendour of basking in the
+reflected radiance, and by a fish's bone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was to have its beginning in that year after the indolent but
+obstinate king, having fallen foul of his Parliaments in his game of
+facing-both-ways in the bitter strife 'twixt Church and people, patched
+up a peace with the Parliament men.
+</P>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+PLATE II.&mdash;MADAME VIGÉE LE BRUN AND CHILD
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+(In the Louvre)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+In Vigée Le Brun's portrait of herself and her child we see in full
+career the Greek ideals that were come upon France&mdash;a France weary of
+light trifling with life, and of mere butterfly flitting from flower to
+flower.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-014t"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<A HREF="images/img-014.jpg">
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-014t.jpg" ALT="Plate II." BORDER="2" WIDTH="564" HEIGHT="754">
+</A>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P>
+Our worthy mediocre Vigée could remember the banished Parliament
+re-entering Paris in triumph on that fourth day of September in 1754
+amidst the exultant shouts of the people; the clergy looking on with a
+scowl the while.  On that same day was born to the Dauphin a son&mdash;the
+little fellow called the Duke de Berry&mdash;whom we shall soon see
+ascending the throne as the ill-starred Louis the Sixteenth, for the
+Dauphin was to be taken before the old king died.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Honest waggish Vigée, painting industriously at his pleasing portraits,
+would recall it well; since, early in the following year, there was
+that to happen under his own modest roof which was to bring fame to his
+name, though he should not live to bask in its full glow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the 10th of April 1755 there was born to him a little girl-child,
+whom they christened Elizabeth Louise Vigée, or as she herself wrote it
+across the title-page of her <I>Souvenirs</I>, Louise Elizabeth Vigée.  Into
+her little fingers Destiny set the skill that had been denied to her
+father; the flame was given to her.  And by the whimsy of things, there
+was also born in far-away Vienna, in this same year of 1755, in the
+palace of the Emperors of Austria, a little princess whom they
+christened Marie Antoinette; who was to marry the little seven-month
+old princeling that lay sucking his thumb in the Royal palace near by,
+and thereby to become future Queen of France.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Like François Boucher, the great painter to the king, Elizabeth Vigée
+came to the pretty business with the advantage of being an artist's
+child; like him, she received her first lessons at an early age from
+her father; and, like him, she moved from earliest childhood in an
+atmosphere of art and artists.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From her father she inherited a talent and taste for art, an amiable
+temper, a gift of wit; from her mother, a very handsome woman, she was
+dowered with a beauty for which she was as remarkable, and to which her
+many portraits of herself bear abundant witness.  From very childhood
+she began to display the proofs of her inheritance&mdash;that happy
+disposition and that charm of manner that were to make her one of the
+most winsome personalities of her time.  At the convent to which her
+parents sent her in her tenth year she fell to drawing on the margins
+of her books, filling them with little portrait-heads&mdash;an incessant
+habit that set her teachers grumbling at her lack of respect towards
+grammar and history.  But to her delighted father the grumbles were
+matter for laughter; in him she found an ally who was hugely proud to
+discover in his girl an inheritor of his gifts.  It is told of the fond
+father that the girl having taken to him one day a drawing, Vigée cried
+out exultantly: "You will be a painter, my girl, or there never was
+one!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Brought up, as the child was, in the world of artists, with the aims
+and ambitions and enthusiasms of artists for her very breath, she could
+not fail to find in such a world, besides the encouragement which was
+prodigally bestowed upon so young and promising a talent, the teaching
+needful to develop her powers.  Amongst the artists who were on
+friendly terms with the girl's father, and of whom Doyen was the most
+intimate, was Davesne, a member and deputy professor of the Academy of
+St. Luke&mdash;he who afterwards claimed to have taught the little Elizabeth
+the elements of painting.  Davesne's lessons were at best but few, and
+seem to have been limited to showing the eager child how to set a
+palette.  The girl was in fact picking up the crumbs that fell from
+many tables; at any rate she showed astoundingly precocious industry
+and gifts, and was soon making quite a stir amongst the painter-folk,
+and becoming a source of pride to her father.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Vigée, however, was only destined to guide and encourage the child
+towards the path; he died on the 9th of May 1768 from swallowing a fish
+bone.  Little Elizabeth was but thirteen years old when this first
+great grief fell upon her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That was a strange world in which the child stood bewildered at the
+baffling cruelty of human destiny&mdash;this eighteenth-century France.  The
+Pompadour had died in the child's ninth year; her dogged and persistent
+enemy, the Dauphin, the year after her; the neglected queen now
+followed the Pompadour to the grave in the June of this same year that
+left little Elizabeth fatherless.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Under the scandals of the Court, and the tyranny and corruption of the
+nobility and clergy, the French people were no longer concealing their
+distress under courtly phrases, nor groaning in secret.  The ideas of
+the new philosophers were penetrating and colouring public opinion.
+They were beginning to talk of the great antique days of Greece, of
+heroes, and of virtue, and of living and dying like Romans.  Fickle
+fashion was turning her back upon the art of old Boucher, and upon
+Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses and pleasant landscapes and bosky
+groves, and was taking up her abode with heroes and amongst picturesque
+ruins.  The Parliament men were demanding rights, were indeed going to
+prison and into banishment for those rights; nay, was not Choiseul the
+great minister of France; and Choiseul's power was deep planted in the
+rights of the people and founded on Parliaments.  All France was
+watching for the dawn of liberty.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+II
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE WONDERFUL CHILD
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The thirteen-year-old child suffered a grief so poignant at the loss of
+her father, to whom she had been passionately attached, that it
+threatened to have the gravest consequences on her future; had it not
+been for her father's old friend Doyen, who, transferring to the girl
+the deep affection he had had for the dead man, urged the child to take
+up her brushes again&mdash;for she was already painting from Nature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was now that she entered the studio of Gabriel Briard, an historical
+painter and member of the Royal Academy; a mediocre artist (though
+superior to Davesne, who claimed to have been her teacher), but he was
+a fine draughtsman.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To Briard's studio she went with a little friend, a year older than
+herself, Mademoiselle Bocquet, who was to become like herself a member
+of the Academy of Saint Luke; a girl of a certain talent who, however,
+abandoned painting on her early marriage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The two girls tripped it to Briard's studio like a couple of
+school-children, demurely escorted by a servant, who carried their
+dinner in a basket; and, as they went to their daily task, be sure the
+quick intelligent girl heard more than a little scandal of the
+Court&mdash;indeed all Paris more than whispered of it&mdash;scandal big with
+meaning for France, and for little Elizabeth not least of all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The tears of the king's grief over the dead body of his queen were
+scarce dried when Louis the Fifteenth still further degraded the
+dignity of the throne of France&mdash;still more dangerously brought royalty
+into contempt by publicly acknowledging as his new mistress a young
+woman from the gutters, the beautiful, laughing, reckless spendthrift
+Du Barry, to whom one of the king's first gifts was Louveciennes, where
+Elizabeth was afterwards to meet her.  Before the year was out Choiseul
+fell; and for the remaining four years that were left to the king
+France was governed by the milliner Du Barry and her precious trio,
+D'Aiguillon, Terray, and Maupeou; and rushed towards the abyss.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+However, these things troubled our precocious Elizabeth but little as
+yet.  The girl grew rapidly in craftsmanship and in personal beauty.
+Indeed, she developed towards womanhood as early and as swiftly as in
+skill of artistry, being remarkable for her prettiness, her freshness
+and delicacy of colouring, and her elegance of figure&mdash;early displaying
+the airy wit that, with these abundant gifts of her fairy godmother,
+were so valuable an aid to the reputation which she was achieving by
+her artistry at a time when most children are in the schoolroom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her advance was so astounding that every one was talking about the
+girl; and the moment soon arrived when her master saw the pupil passing
+him in skill of hand and reputation as a painter; gazing dumbfounded at
+the stream of the greatest celebrities and personages of the day
+flocking to the studio of a girl of but fifteen years of age.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How strange a thing the weaving of the web of Destiny!  In this very
+same year there came out of Austria a fifteen-year-old princess of its
+Royal House, leaving the home of her forefathers in tears, and amidst
+the tears of a people that had grown to love the winsome child; for,
+Marie Antoinette was setting forth on her life's adventure as future
+Queen of France, a tragic wayfaring for a butterfly!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Elizabeth Vigée's extraordinary rise into notice brought her the
+friendship and counsel of Joseph Vernet, who gave her most precious
+advice which was a beacon to her career all her years: "My child," said
+he, "do not follow any system of schools.  Consult only the works of
+the great Italian and Flemish masters.  But, above all things, make as
+many studies as you can from Nature.  Nature is the supreme master.  If
+you study Nature with care it will prevent you from picking up any
+mannerisms."
+</P>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+PLATE III.&mdash;MADAME VIGÉE LE BRUN AND CHILD
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+(In the Louvre)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+Vigée Le Brun painted another portrait of herself and her little
+girl-child; and she painted both, fortunately for her fame, when her
+skill was at its increase.  They stand out, with all their limitations,
+pure and exquisite as the Madonna and Child of Italy's finest
+achievement; for they were painted by a woman of genius with the
+passionate love of a child that is the wondrous heritage of woman&mdash;none
+the less religious in that it apes no show of religion.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-024t"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<A HREF="images/img-024.jpg">
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-024t.jpg" ALT="Plate III." BORDER="2" WIDTH="618" HEIGHT="774">
+</A>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P>
+Doyen and Greuze also helped her with suggestions; but she was from the
+beginning her own teacher.  Davesne and Briard only flattered
+themselves by claiming her tutoring.  The girl showed in no way any
+slightest sign of their influence.  Ardent and enthusiastic in her
+pursuit of art, she haunted the galleries and private collections, but
+above all she went to Nature.  Naturalness is by consequence a marked
+attribute of one who painted in this artificial age&mdash;in portraiture she
+largely escaped the conventional style, both its limitations and, be it
+also confessed, something of that great beauty of style and that superb
+decorative splendour that mark the handsome achievement of Nattier and
+Drouais and their fellows.  Nor must it be forgotten that the realism
+claimed by the later years, and the naturalism claimed for this girl's
+art, were already to be seen in full career in the master-work of La
+Tour in portraiture, and in the still-life of Chardin.  This girl's
+genius never reached to the force of La Tour, nor the superb handling
+or colour-sense or vigour of Chardin, but she painted with rare skill
+the eminent women of her day and, with near as remarkable a skill, more
+than one man; her loss would have left a serious gap in the statement
+of the French genius of the end of the seventeen hundreds.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It has been a custom too long indulged in by literary critics to praise
+her at the expense of Boucher's "conventionality"; but she never
+painted a portrait that surpassed the Wallace "Pompadour" or the
+"Infant Orleans," to say nothing of other rare portraits from Boucher's
+easel.  To set her up in rivalry against one of the greatest decorative
+artists of the years is but to give her an ugly fall.  The astounding
+part is not that she painted better than she did, but that she achieved
+what she did.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But free from convention?  No.  She was a woman, and a painter of
+women&mdash;a painter of women from the woman's point of view that desires
+the world only to think of woman in her pose as woman, reticent,
+careful to screen the impulsive, most of all the vexatious, the
+violent, and the irregular moods of femininity's temperament from the
+eyes of the passer-by; always eager to show woman dressed for the part,
+and well dressed.  She was incapable of stating the deeps of character;
+and had she had the power, she would have looked upon it as something
+of an indecency&mdash;or worse, an indelicacy.  She would, in fact, have
+preferred to deny the deeps.  She sets her sitter ever in the
+drawing-room of fashion, draws a heavy curtain with a rattle between
+the drawing-room and the inner boudoir (the "sulking room"), slams the
+door on the bedroom, or any hint that there is a bedroom, before she
+cries "come in," to admit us to her studio; she prefers to show the
+woman in her properties as the creature of fashion, not in the intimacy
+of her inner living and full significance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is as much and as absolutely convention as any tricking out of
+ladies as Dresden shepherdesses, and the more subtle in that it is the
+less obvious; as much convention as any painting of large eyes or
+rose-bud mouths.  It is as misleading as convention.  But it is the
+basis of a woman's life; and, in that, it is true.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Boucher has been blamed for being conventional; is often sneered at as
+the arch-make-believe.  But when he painted women he painted them as
+men really see them with their masks off, and with all their allure of
+femininity.  This sneer of convention is a two-edged sword.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the year that they found Boucher dead, seated at his easel before an
+unfinished canvas of Venus, this girl of fifteen discovered herself
+celebrated; saw her studio invaded by the flower of the world of
+fashion; the women of the nobility at the French Court visiting her;
+the exclusive doors of the Faubourg St. Germain thrown open to her;
+princesses, duchesses, countesses, celebrities of the day and strangers
+of distinction her friends.  She was in close touch with the leading
+artists of her day&mdash;Le Moyne, blunt Quentin de La Tour, and the rest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The girl, in spite of her astounding industry, was soon wholly unable
+to carry out the orders for portraits which rained in upon her; her
+charm of manner and her increasing beauty added to the pressure of the
+siege of her admirers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A little while before her fifteenth birthday her mother married again a
+young jeweller, of the name of Le Sèvre, a miserly fellow, who, under
+the pretext of taking them into the country, hired a little house at
+Chaillot, where they went with the girl for their Sundays; the thrifty
+stepfather planting its garden with the gay blossoms of the useful
+haricot-bean and the nasturtium.  He had a frugal mind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The petty tyrannies of the thrifty jeweller, his mean outlook on life,
+and his sordid aims, made of the habits and atmosphere of his class an
+even more uncongenial world for this brilliant girl to live in.
+Happily the pursuit of her art, and the friendship of that circle into
+which that art and her gifts and charming personality raised her,
+mitigated the tyranny of this sordid relationship.  And, to add to her
+relief, Madame Suzanne, wife of the sculptor, and a friend of her
+mother, would carry off the girl with her into the country; and it was
+during one of their walks at Marly that she met for the first time
+Marie Antoinette.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the 10th of May 1774, a month before Elizabeth Vigée's nineteenth
+birthday, King Louis the Fifteenth died of the small-pox&mdash;died without
+a friend, for he had dismissed the Du Barry in tears a short while
+before.  His body was hastily thrust into a coffin, and hurried at the
+trot through the darkness to St. Denis, for fear of attack from the
+sullen crowds that gathered to do it dishonour; so was he huddled away
+amongst the bones of the ancient kings of his race, unattended by the
+Court, and amidst the curses of his people.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Louis the Sixteenth, son of Louis Fifteenth's only son, the dead
+Dauphin, ascended the throne of France in his twentieth year, a
+pure-minded, honourable young fellow, full of good intentions, and
+sincerely anxious for the well-being of his people; but of a diffident
+temper, timid, hesitating, and uncertain in decision, and under the
+influence of his young consort, the beautiful Queen Marie Antoinette,
+who had the imperious temper of her house, wedded to light and
+frivolous manners; she brought to her counsels a deplorable lack of
+judgment and a steadfast incompetence in knowledge of men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The good qualities of this young pair had been very well in private
+life; but France needed greater abilities for her guidance than the
+simple virtues.  It was a hideous part of the destiny of this young
+couple that they came to rule over a France that was passionately
+angered at the misdeeds of a king and his privileged class of nobles
+and clergy who had gone before them&mdash;of a class that had come unscathed
+through that reign, and were grown incapable of realising that they
+could not come unscathed through another.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Du Barry flown, and her precious trio of ministers with her, Louis
+recalled the crafty old schemer Maurepas to power from the banishment
+into which the Pompadour had sent him; but he otherwise began well by
+making Turgot his minister of finance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the 25th of October in this 1774 that saw Louis Quinze and Marie
+Antoinette come to the throne of France, Elizabeth Vigée was elected to
+the Academy of St. Luke at nineteen years of age.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She brought to her early successes a charming modesty and an utter
+absence of conceit or of pose that added greatly to her reputation, and
+paved the way to further honours.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+III
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+But early success was not to be without black care stepping into the
+triumphal car in her procession towards an early and wide fame of this
+charming and accomplished young woman of twenty.  Honours were easy.
+But the devil was in the machinery.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her family had lived in the Rue de Cléry, opposite the hotel Lubert;
+thence they had drifted to the Rue St. Honoré hard by the Palais Royal;
+they now returned to the Rue de Cléry to the hotel Lubert itself.  Here
+it chanced that Le Brun, the expert, carried on a lucrative traffic in
+pictures.  His gallery attracted the pretty artist, who could study
+there at leisure the works of the great masters that passed through.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The two families soon became intimate.  Le Brun carefully weighing the
+great advantages that such a union could bring to him, but entangled by
+his engagement to marry the daughter of a Dutch dealer in pictures who
+lived opposite to him, and with whom he had considerable business in
+works of art, beat about as to how he could marry Elizabeth Vigée.  The
+girl was living in the splendour of a circle to which her family could
+not hope to aspire; the picture-dealer belonged to the middle-class in
+which her own family moved.  Any day she might marry out of that
+middle-class world into the world of fashion.  He saw that the girl
+moved in, and was happiest in, a great world to which he had not the
+key.  He had the ambition to belong to that world, though his
+common-sense might have told him that he never could do more than hang
+about its outer courts.  He was a calculating blackguard, a man of
+loose life, and a vulgar fellow with vulgar ambitions.  He saw astutely
+enough that this girl was well on the high-road to considerable
+fortune.  The Dutch girl opposite necessitated wary walking.  He played
+the romantic lover, and before six months were run out he was pressing
+his suit, asking Elizabeth Vigée to marry him secretly.
+</P>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+PLATE IV.&mdash;PORTRAIT OF MADAME VIGÉE LE BRUN
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+(In the National Gallery, London)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+She saw at Anvers the famous "Chapeau de paille" by Rubens.  This
+canvas by Rubens clearly inspired her to the painting of the portrait
+of herself in a straw hat, where she stands bathed in the sunlight, her
+palette in her hand.  The painting of the flesh of the pretty face is
+exquisite, and in spite of intense finish is broadly conceived and rich
+and glowing in colour.  The clumsy drawing of the hand that holds the
+palette is the only defect in this, one of her masterpieces.  The
+picture has the added interest of revealing to us how Vigée Le Brun set
+her palette.  The thing is thrilling with life; and the little feminine
+conceit of wearing her black wrap is quaintly delightful.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-034t"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<A HREF="images/img-034.jpg">
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-034t.jpg" ALT="Plate IV." BORDER="2" WIDTH="567" HEIGHT="778">
+</A>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P>
+The girl seems to have had a presentiment of the misery that such a
+marriage would mean for her.  After long and serious hesitation she
+gave her consent.  It was perhaps due to a sense of being between the
+devil and the deep sea, for her sordid and miserly stepfather the
+jeweller must have been a sorry table-companion of her home life.  If
+she suspected the picture-dealer to be a rogue, she thought, likely
+enough, that the more genial rogue would be a pleasanter fellow to live
+with than the other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She married him secretly on the 11th of January 1776, on the edge of
+her twenty-first year.  It was not a wholly promising beginning, this
+that gave her the name that she was to immortalise&mdash;Vigée Le Brun.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a sorry match.  It began in secrecy; she was to discover that it
+was founded on a treachery.  When the marriage was discovered it was
+too late to dissuade the girl from it; she had to listen to some plain
+home-truths as a Dutchman saw them, and to grim prophecies of the evil
+that would come of the business.  But he might have spared his breath.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was to have her ugly awakening.  She early discovered that Le Brun
+was a gambler, a rake, and a thoroughly dissolute and unscrupulous
+rogue.  It was not long before he had not only squandered his own
+fortune, but was playing ducks and drakes with every penny that she
+gained by her art and her untiring industry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was soon to become a mother; the love that she had sedately allowed
+to go out to her disreputable and pretentious husband, and which she
+had early withdrawn in tatters, she now lavished upon this, her
+girl-child.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Meanwhile, her reputation increased by leaps and bounds.  Her studio
+was simply besieged by "the Quality."  The Duchess of Orleans had to
+wait her turn a whole year before she could be painted.  Vigée Le
+Brun's praise was in every mouth.  She was sung in prose and verse; the
+poetasters ran to much doggerel of handsome intent, as was the fashion
+of the day.  Marquises and the rest of the scribbling folk tripped over
+halting feet to sing her charms and immortalise her art.  "L'orgueil de
+France" rhymed it to "la double puissance;" and "immortal crayon" to
+"admiration."  They spilled the rosy inks.  Le Brun, not the
+picture-dealing husband, but the poetical fellow who modestly nicknamed
+himself the Pindar of his age, plucked at the lyre with both hands in
+her honour.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nay, have we not the written record that Laharpe, uttering his rhymed
+discourse on the genius of women to a great gathering of the bloods and
+wits at the Academy, and bursting into violent poesies in announcing
+that Elizabeth, "the modern Rosalba, but more brilliant than she, weds
+the voice of Favart with the smiles of a Venus"&mdash;every one rose to
+their feet, "not omitting the Duchess of Chartres and the King of
+Sweden," and turning to the blushing Elizabeth, applauded her "with
+transports"!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So much for France within the walls of the Royal Academy.  But France
+without!  The great minister, Turgot, baffled by the selfishness of the
+privileged classes, fell.  But Louis called to power near as good a
+man, worthy banker Neckar.  In an unfortunate hour for the Royal house,
+and against the will of the king, be it credited, and to the
+bewilderment of Neckar, the nation having gone mad with enthusiasm over
+the prospect of an alliance with Britain's revolted American colonies,
+war was declared against England, France undertaking not to conclude
+peace until the colonies were free.  The success of the revolted
+colonies made the Revolution in France a certainty.  The fall of Neckar
+and the setting up of the reckless and incompetent Calonne over the
+destinies of France brought the shout of the Democracy to the gardens
+of the king.  Vigée Le Brun's picture of the dandified man certainly
+does not show him a leader of great enterprises.  His reckless
+extravagance satisfied the nobles; it brought bankruptcy stalking to
+the doors of the king's palace.  The distress and sufferings of the
+people became unbearable.  The miserable scandal of the diamond
+necklace added to the discredit of the queen.  The Royal family and the
+Court sank further in the people's respect.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As for Vigée Le Brun, she was come into her kingdom.  And it is during
+those twenty years, from shortly after her marriage until she was
+forty, that her best and most brilliant portraiture belongs, before the
+hardness and dryness of her later style showed signs of the decay of
+her powers.
+</P>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+PLATE V.&mdash;THE TWO ELDER CHILDREN OF MARIE ANTOINETTE&mdash;THE FIRST DAUPHIN
+(born 1781, died 1789) AND THE MADAME ROYALE
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+(At Versailles)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+The little Dauphin of four years, and his seven-year-old sister, the
+Madame Royale, seated on a bank, the boy's hat thrown at his feet upon
+the flower-strewn ground&mdash;a work in which Vigée Le Brun's colour-sense,
+her fine arrangement, and her feeling for style reach to their highest
+flight.  The handsome boy was mercifully taken at the dawn of the
+Revolution; the girl was to know all its terrors.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-040t"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<A HREF="images/img-040.jpg">
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-040t.jpg" ALT="Plate V." BORDER="2" WIDTH="586" HEIGHT="722">
+</A>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P>
+To its earliest, freshest years belongs the first portrait that Vigée
+Le Brun painted, in her twenty-fourth year (1779) of Marie Antoinette,
+in which the young queen is seen with a large basket, and dressed in a
+satin gown, holding a rose in her hand&mdash;painted the year after the
+birth of her eldest child, the Madame Royale.  Here is no hint of the
+tragedy that was to overwhelm the handsome young daughter of Austria;
+all was as yet but gaiety and roses and sunshine and pleasant airs and
+the glamour that hovers about a throne.  But there are signs of the
+imperious temper of her house, combined with the levity and frivolity
+of manners, which were so early to make her unpopular.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Vigée Le Brun was to paint her royal mistress close on thirty times
+during the next ten years, until the prison doors shut upon the Royal
+house of France; and there grew up between the two women a subtle and
+charming friendship that was to make the talented woman a dogged and
+convinced royalist to her dying day&mdash;indeed, the temperament of women
+needs small incense towards the worshipping of idols.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Vigée Le Brun was rarely more happy in her art than in several of the
+many portraits she painted of herself about this time&mdash;more
+particularly the two famous pictures of herself with her little
+daughter.  "The Marie Antoinette with the Rose" is redolent still of
+the eighteenth-century France&mdash;the siècle Louis Quinze.  In Vigée Le
+Brun's portrait of herself and her child we see in full career the
+Greek ideals that were come upon France&mdash;a France weary of light
+trifling with life, and of mere butterfly flitting from flower to
+flower; here is that crying back to the antique spirit that was
+leavening the middle-class of France which was about to claim dominion
+over the land and to step to the foot of the throne and usurp the
+sceptre and diadem of her ancient line of kings as the Third Estate;
+and to come to power with violent upheaval, wading to the throne
+through blood and terror.  Here we see Vigée Le Brun, royalist,
+glorifying motherhood, her arms and shoulders bare in chaste nudity,
+her body scantily attired in the simple purity of Greek robes, her
+child in her embrace.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Vigée Le Brun painted another portrait of herself and her little
+girl-child; and she painted both, fortunately for her fame, when her
+skill was at its increase.  They stand out, with all their limitations,
+pure and exquisite as the Madonna and Child of Italy's finest
+achievement; for they were painted by a woman of genius with the
+passionate love of a child that is the wondrous heritage of woman; none
+the less religious in that it apes no show of religion.  We see the age
+of free thought stating the innate religion of free thought; as
+Renaissance Italy painted paganism in religious disguise with the
+innate irreligion of its day.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In all her portraiture one is struck by the fact that Vigée Le Brun
+took much pains to arrange the draperies in what she considered
+picturesque fashion rather than that she painted the ordinary gowns of
+her day as her sitters wore them on entering her studio.  And we have
+her own word for it in her <I>Souvenirs</I> (wherein the careful record of
+each picture that she painted may be found) that the dress of most
+women of the time seemed ugly to her&mdash;as it does to so many artists,
+generally not the best, in all times&mdash;indeed, she used every ounce of
+tact that she possessed in order to "arrange" the draperies.  She
+sternly set her face against the use of powder and paint that the
+fashion of her century put upon complexions even of the most delicate
+beauties; and she always, when she could, arranged the hair of the
+women sitters.  She tells, not without pride, how, having persuaded the
+beautiful Duchess of Grammont-Caderousse to put off paint and powder,
+and to allow her to arrange her jet-black hair, drawing it down over
+the forehead and separating it over the brow and arranging it in
+irregular little curls, the duchess went to the theatre as she was, and
+created the fashion thereby, in spite of the fact that Vigée Le Brun
+could never persuade the queen to give in to her, Marie Antoinette
+replying to all her beguilings: "I shall be the last to follow the
+fashion; I do not wish them to say that I am trying to hide my huge
+forehead."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Marie Antoinette was beginning to realise that all France did not fawn
+upon her with the courtier's bended shoulder or pretty speech.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+IV
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+MARIE ANTOINETTE
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+In her twenty-seventh year (1782) Vigée Le Brun made a journey into
+Flanders with her husband, who had gone thither picture-dealing.  The
+works of the Flemish masters that she there saw had a marked effect
+upon the increase of her art.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She saw at Anvers the famous "Chapeau de paille" by Rubens; and had
+revealed to her the beauties of a sun-flooded figure, with the face
+painted in the golden glow of reflected lights under the shadow flung
+down over it by a large hat.  This canvas by Rubens clearly inspired
+her to the painting of the portrait of herself in a straw hat, where
+she stands bathed in the sunlight, her palette in her hand.  The
+painting of the flesh of the pretty face is exquisite, and in spite of
+intense finish is broadly conceived and rich and glowing in colour.
+The clumsy drawing of the hand that holds the palette is the only
+defect in this, one of her masterpieces.  The picture has the added
+interest of revealing to us how Vigée Le Brun set her palette.  The
+thing is thrilling with life; and the little feminine conceit of
+wearing her black wrap is quaintly delightful.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thenceforth her art has an added sense of style, a fuller statement of
+atmosphere; in her handling of paint and employment of colour she was
+soon to reach the very height of her achievement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was shortly after her return from this journey into Flanders that
+Joseph Vernet decided to put down her name for election to the Royal
+Academy.  Her portrait of herself created such a sensation that her
+election became assured.  She had to paint the usual formal <I>tableau de
+reception</I>, and chose Allegory, painting her "La Paix ramenant
+l'Abondance," which, though a somewhat stilted affair such as Academies
+demand, is full of charm&mdash;and is still to be seen at the Louvre.  She
+was received into the Academy on the last day of May in 1783 in her
+twenty-eighth year, and thenceforward had the valuable privilege of the
+right to show at the Salon.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Vigée Le Brun had not reached to such rapid and wide success, in spite
+of all her charm and youth and the defence that chivalry should grant
+to her sex, without setting jealous tongues wagging.  The "Peace
+bringing back Abundance" happened to be hung under a canvas by
+Ménageot, "The Birth of the Dauphin"; and comparisons between the two
+pictures were aimed at creating a slander which there were only too
+many ready to believe; for it was supported by certain facts which fell
+into place, and took on a suspicious air when pointed to as supporting
+evidence.  This Ménageot, who afterwards became Director of the Academy
+at Rome, lived in the same house as Vigée Le Brun; and rumour soon got
+agog to the effect that he was in the habit of painting, or at any rate
+putting the finishing touches to, her work, Pierre, at this time first
+painter to the king, had employed this slander in order to oppose her
+election to the Academy; he was the leading spirit of a cabal against
+her, as soon became known; for he was the victim soon afterwards of a
+satirical jingle that went the round of the studios.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was harassed also by the petty spites of enemies who did not
+hesitate to try and have her studio seized under the charge that she
+was painting without legal title since she had never been apprenticed
+to a painter.  And malignant tongues whispered it abroad that she never
+would have been elected to the Academy had it not been done at the
+command of the Court.  They made her very friendship with the queen a
+whip with which to lash at her.  She was now painting many portraits of
+the queen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Vigée Le Brun spent her entire day at her easel, from the time she
+arose in the morning, and she rose early, until the daylight went.  She
+gave up dining in the town, in order not to be drawn away from her
+work; and the temptation must have been strong for a young and charming
+woman so greatly in request.  But at nightfall she went out to social
+functions, and herself received the most brilliant and distinguished
+members of society and art and letters at her own house, giving
+concerts where Grétry, whose portrait she painted, and other celebrated
+musicians played portions of their operas before they were seen or
+heard upon the stage; whilst the grandees of the old noblesse and the
+famous wits frequented her house.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again, the report of her receptions got noised abroad; and envious
+tongues were soon exaggerating the extravagance and luxury in which she
+lived, descending to such childish tittle-tattle as that she lit her
+fires with bank-notes, that the number of her guests was so great and
+so distinguished that, for lack of seats, the marshals of France had to
+sit upon the floor; gossip and babble that were to cost her dearer than
+she thought, though she laughed it all away with a shrug of her pretty
+shoulders at the time.  It was concerning one of her six-o'clock
+suppers that a slander was started which was to be a serious menace to
+her in after years.
+</P>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+PLATE VI.&mdash;PORTRAIT OF MADAME MOLÉ-RAYMOND
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+(In the Louvre)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+This famous painting of Madame Molé-Raymond, the pretty actress of the
+Comédie Française, is one of Vigée Le Brun's masterpieces.  Her brush
+is now at its most dexterous use; the laughing pretty woman is caught
+like a live thing and fixed upon the canvas as at a stroke as she trips
+across the vision, with muff upraised, smiling out upon us as she
+passes.  Vigée Le Brun never stated character with more consummate
+skill than here; never set down action with more vivid brush, catching
+movement flying.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-050t"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<A HREF="images/img-050.jpg">
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-050t.jpg" ALT="Plate VI." BORDER="2" WIDTH="569" HEIGHT="787">
+</A>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P>
+It was an age of small oratory.  Every man who could string a neat
+sentence together, scribbled or harangued.  It was boorish and an
+unfashionable thing not to be an author, a poetaster, a little orator,
+a critic, a dabbler in the arts.  At coffee-houses or clubs,
+wheresoever men foregathered, some fellow would mount a table and
+harangue his friends.  The bloods caught the vogue, little foreseeing
+that it made a hotbed for the airing of discontents, and for the
+parading of ideals which alone could blot out those discontents.  All
+took to it like ducks to the village pond.  There was much quackery;
+some honest noise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now it so chanced that at Vigée Le Brun's there was a gathering at
+which Le Brun&mdash;"Pindar" Le Brun the poet&mdash;spouting a discourse,
+described a Greek supper.  The idea at once sprang up that they should
+have one straightway; they got up the cook and started to set the thing
+going, the poet guiding the making of the sauces.  Amidst the general
+merriment Vigée Le Brun suggested that they should dress for the
+fantastic affair in Greek costume, and arrange the tables and seats
+after the antique fashion.  So the jocular business went apace.  It was
+a merry party of Athenians that sat down to the feast&mdash;"Pindar" Le Brun
+wearing laurels in his ridiculous hair, and a purple mantle round about
+him; the Marquis de Cubières tricked out with a guitar as a golden
+lyre; Vigée Le Brun being chief costumier to the frolic, draping
+Chaudet the sculptor and others in as near Greek fashion as could be.
+Vigée Le Brun, herself in white robes and tunic, and garlanded with
+flowers and veiled, seems to have presided over a rollicking gathering.
+The noise of the jollification got abroad.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The banquet cost the frugal Vigée Le Brun some fifteen francs in all;
+but in the mouths of the spiteful the tale of its extravagance quickly
+grew.  A few days afterwards there was talk of it at Court; and the
+king was solemnly assured by "one who knew," that it had cost 20,000
+francs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This unfortunate Greek supper dogged her steps in the wanderings over
+the face of Europe that were to be her long exile.  At Rome she was to
+discover that it had cost her 40,000 francs; at Vienna it was to rise
+to 60,000; and when she reached St. Petersburg she was to find that,
+gathering volume on the long journey, it had increased to 80,000
+francs, when she scotched the lie and killed it; but not before it had
+served her a very ugly turn.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The truth was that she was being made to share the unpopularity that
+had fallen upon the queen.  She was painting, and was on friendly terms
+with, not only the Royal Family, but with the unpopular ministers and
+servants of the crown, and with the noblesse, who in league with the
+queen were chiefly concerned in keeping the king from popular measures.
+She painted, according to the authorities, in 1785, in her thirtieth
+year, the portrait of Calonne though a parchment in the engraving from
+it bears the date 1787.  The portrait of the minister set slander going
+against the artist, as regards the vast sum paid for it.  The portrait
+of the seated minister ends below the knees; and it was of this picture
+of the weak Calonne, who clung so limpet-like to office, that Sophie
+Arnould, seeing it at the Salon, made the neat remark: "It is because
+he sticks to office that Madame Le Brun has cut off his legs."  But
+whether she received much or little mattered not much to Vigée Le Brun;
+her husband seized and squandered all she earned.  As a matter of fact,
+she received 3600 francs for the portrait from Calonne, sent in a
+handsome box worth 1200 francs&mdash;a couple of hundred pounds at the
+outside.  It was a small price compared to the sums she was now
+receiving for portraits; Beaujou, the financier, paid 8000 francs (say
+300 guineas); Prince Lubomirski 20,000 francs (£800)&mdash;not that the poor
+maker of these works gained thereby, for her precious picture-dealer
+husband had it according to his habit, and she had difficulty and a
+scene even to get two louis from the price when she asked the rogue for
+it.  However, her reputation ever increased.  She showed at this same
+Salon of 1785, in her thirtieth year, the portrait of the little
+Dauphin of four years and his seven-year-old sister, the Madame Royale,
+seated on a bank, the boy's hat thrown at his feet upon the
+flower-strewn ground&mdash;a work in which her colour-sense, her fine
+arrangement, and her feeling for style reach to their highest flight.
+It is perhaps the most wholly successful and most complete and masterly
+canvas of her long career.  It hangs in Versailles, a pathetic comment,
+this happy moment in the children's life, when the days looked rosy and
+all the world was a beautiful garden.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the Salon of 1787, in her thirty-second year, is record of a picture
+of "Marie Antoinette and her Children"; and of herself with her girl;
+and, amongst others, those of Mademoiselle Dugazon and of Madame
+Molé-Raymond.  This famous painting of Madame Molé-Raymond, the pretty
+actress of the Comédie Française, is one of Vigée Le Brun's
+masterpieces.  Her brush is now at its most dexterous use; the laughing
+pretty woman is caught like a live thing and fixed upon the canvas as
+at a stroke as she trips across the vision, with muff upraised, smiling
+out upon us as she passes.  Vigée Le Brun never stated character with
+more consummate skill than here; never set down action with more vivid
+brush, catching movement flying; she never stated life more truly nor
+with more exquisite tact than in this bright vision of a dainty woman
+of the theatre.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Affairs in France were now in such a huddle that the State could not
+pay interest on the public loans.  Calonne could no longer disguise the
+serious business from himself or the king.  There was nothing for it
+but to call the Assembly of Notables.  They met at Versailles on the
+22nd of February 1787.  Calonne fell, to give place to his enemy the
+turbulent and stupid Cardinal de Brienne.  The Court was completely
+foul of the people when De Brienne threw up office in the midst of
+riots in Paris and throughout the country, and, in panic, fled to
+Italy, leaving the Government in dire confusion and distress.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The king took a wise course; he recalled Neckar.  The convoking of the
+States-General now became a certainty.  Paris rang with the hoarse cry
+for the Third Estate.  The wrangle as to the constitution of the
+States-General became every day more dangerous.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The last portrait that Vigée Le Brun painted of the doomed queen was
+the canvas that hangs at Versailles known as "Marie Antoinette and her
+Children," in which the queen is seen seated beside a cradle with the
+baby Duke of Normandy on her knee, the little Madame Royale at her
+side, and the small Dauphin pointing into the cradle.  When the doors
+of the Salon of 1788 were thrown open the painting was not quite
+finished; and for some days the frame reserved for it remained empty.
+It was on the eve of what was to become the Revolution, and the country
+was speaking now in no hushed whispers of the public deficit in the
+nation's treasury, and gazing bewildered at the bankruptcy that
+threatened the land.  The empty frame drew forth the bitter jest:
+"Voilà le déficit!"  The little Dauphin's pointing at the cradle was
+not to be without its significance&mdash;for the little fellow was to die at
+the outbreak of the Revolution and his place was to be taken by the
+babe on his mother's knee&mdash;the small Duke of Normandy was to become
+Dauphin in his place, and, in some few years, with his little sister,
+was to be made a close prisoner in the Temple.  The king and the queen,
+separated from their children and each other, were to go out to the
+guillotine; the girl was to live through the seething hell of the
+Terror as by a miracle, and thereafter unhappily enough as the Duchess
+of Angoulême; but the fair boy, heir to one of the noblest heritages in
+all this vast world, torn from Marie Antoinette whilst the queen still
+lived, a prisoner, was to be handed to the tender mercies of the
+infamous Simon, jailor at the Temple, who was to train the frightened
+child to drink and swear and sing with piping treble the <I>camagnole</I>,
+until, hidden away in a tower of the prison, he was to die like a
+frightened hunted thing, his shirt not changed for months&mdash;die in
+darkness and squalor and in a filthy state.  The guillotine did no
+mightier act of simple godlike vengeance than the day it sheared the
+skull from the foul neck of cordwainer Simon.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Marie Antoinette, in this the thirtieth portrait that Vigée Le Brun
+painted of her, is no longer the mere careless, gorgeous butterfly of
+some ten years ago when the little more than girl-artist first limned
+her features in the "Marie Antoinette with a Rose."  The ten years that
+have passed are ending in solemn seriousness for the thirty-third
+birthday of the French Queen.  The future is a threat.  The people are
+demanding rule by Parliament&mdash;are singing for it&mdash;writing broadsheets
+claiming it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was about this time of stress and strain and anxiety at Court that,
+in 1788, Berger engraved so superbly one of Vigée Le Brun's greatest
+portraits, the consummately painted character-study, and exquisitely
+dainty colour-harmony of the Marchioness de Sabran.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The elections to the States-General took place amidst indescribable
+excitement throughout all France.  The winter which went before the
+meeting of the States-General was terribly severe; it came on top of a
+bad harvest; the price of bread rose to famine pitch.  Neckar
+generously sacrificed a vast part of his private fortune to buy food
+for the hunger-stricken poor of Paris.  It was in national gloom that
+the States-General met at Versailles on the 5th of May in 1789.  That
+day sounded the knell of the Monarchy.
+</P>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+PLATE VII.-MARIE ANTOINETTE AND HER CHILDREN
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+(At Versailles)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+The last portrait that Vigée Le Brun painted of the doomed queen was
+the canvas that hangs at Versailles known as "Marie Antoinette and her
+Children," in which the queen is seen seated beside a cradle with the
+baby Duke of Normandy on her knee, the little Madame Royale at her
+side, and the small Dauphin pointing into the cradle.  When the doors
+of the Salon of 1788 were thrown open the painting was not quite
+finished; and for some days the frame reserved for it remained empty.
+It was on the eve of what was to become the Revolution, and the country
+was speaking now in no hushed whispers of the public deficit in the
+nation's treasury, and gazing bewildered at the bankruptcy that
+threatened the land.  The empty frame drew forth the bitter jest:
+"Voilà, le déficit!"
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-060t"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<A HREF="images/img-060.jpg">
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-060t.jpg" ALT="Plate VII." BORDER="2" WIDTH="568" HEIGHT="726">
+</A>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P>
+In little over a month the States-General was become the
+self-constituted National Assembly; a few days later, on the 20th of
+June, the deputies took the solemn oath in the tennis-court&mdash;the <I>jeu
+de paume</I>.  At the queen's foolish urging the king fell back on force;
+filled Paris with troops under De Broglie; dismissed Neckar.  The
+people at once took to arms.  The 14th of July saw the fall of the
+hated Bastille.  On the 22nd the people hanged Foulon to the
+street-lamp at the corner of the Place de Grève&mdash;and thenceforth the
+terrible shout <I>à la lanterne!</I> became the cry of fashion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such was the dawn of the Revolution in the streets of Paris, upon which
+Vigée Le Brun's eyes gazed down terrified in her thirty-fourth year.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Quickly followed the rumblings of the dark thunder-clouds that came up
+in threatening blackness behind the dawn&mdash;and which were about to burst
+with a roar upon reckless Paris.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The king showed astounding courage and considerable capacity during
+these awful days; but his work was constantly thwarted and ruined by
+the Court party and the queen.  On the 3rd of October the officers of
+the regiment of Flanders were foolishly entertained at Versailles, and
+the whole Court being present, the white cockade of the Bourbons was
+distributed amidst rapturous approval, and the national tricolour
+trodden under foot.  The starving rabble of Paris knew it, by the next
+day; and headed by a band of frantic women, set out for Versailles on
+the morning of the 5th of October, under the leadership of the ruffian
+Maillard who had distinguished himself at the capture of the Bastille.
+They overran the palace.  The king again showed superb nerve; and the
+mob, abashed and admiring, calling "Long live the king!" withdrew to
+the courtyards.  The unfortunate brawl in the courtyard followed; and
+the mishap of the night.  The next day the Royal Family had to make
+their humiliating journey with the rabble to Paris.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Small hope for Vigée Le Brun, unless she stole out of France, and at
+once.  She stood, indeed, in perilous plight.  Her relations with the
+Court, and with the nobility, made every hour that she stayed in Paris
+a greater danger to her life.  It was dangerous to go into the
+streets&mdash;dangerous to leave Paris&mdash;but for Vigée Le Brun more dangerous
+to stay.  She was a marked woman.  There was for her one sole way from
+death, and it was flight.  By delaying she risked also the life of her
+child.  Her friends begged her to be gone.  She took the girl; searched
+hurriedly for all the money she could lay hands on&mdash;her husband had
+taken all but eighty francs (some three guineas)&mdash;and, leaving her
+canvases where they stood unfinished, she passed out of the studio that
+had been all the world to her; the place where she had spent the
+happiest hours of her life.  A few days before, she had had to refuse
+to begin a portrait of the future Duchess de Noailles&mdash;to save her own
+head, not to paint those of others, was now become her single aim.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the 5th of October of this year of 1789, that fearsome day that saw
+the rabble marching to Versailles, Vigée Le Brun took her seat in a
+diligence with her little girl, seated between a thief and a jacobin;
+the diligence rattled along the cobbles of her beloved city, and out of
+the gates&mdash;in such fashion Vigée Le Brun left Paris and took the road
+for Italy.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+V
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+SWEET EXILE
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+As she rattled out of Paris between her grim companions, Vigée Le Brun
+little thought that her exile would last a dozen years; but everywhere
+she went she was destined to be welcomed with honour; and wheresoever
+she roamed&mdash;and she ranged across the face of the land wellnigh from
+end to end of it&mdash;she was to receive the same ovations, meet with the
+same success, be rewarded with the highest honours.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She went amongst strangers with but eighty francs in her purse out of
+all the fortune she had made by her dogged industry; she was to find in
+exile, not only a gracious home, but at last an immunity from the
+shameless squandering of her earnings by the disreputable thief whom
+she had married.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At Turin, her first halting-place, she tarried but a short while.  She
+found that her name and fame had gone before her.  At Bologna no French
+citizen was allowed to stay for more than twenty-four hours; but for
+Vigée Le Brun permission was brought without her asking for it.  She
+spent three days gazing at the masterpieces of the Bologna School; and
+was made a member of its Academy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At Florence she was asked to paint her portrait for the celebrated
+collection of portraits of famous artists by their own hand at the
+Uffizi Gallery.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At Rome the same impressive welcome awaited her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here she was soon at work again, with palette and brushes, upon the
+portrait of herself, which she had promised to the Gallery at Florence,
+where it now hangs&mdash;one of the most exquisite heads she ever painted,
+sunny, smiling, happy, with youth come back to it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After eight months in Rome she moved on to Naples.  Here it was that
+she painted the portrait of Lady Hamilton, Nelson's Emma, reclining by
+the sea, holding a cup in her hand as a Bacchante.  Vigée Le Brun also
+painted her as a Sibyl&mdash;that picture which she took with her wherever
+she went, from town to town, and which always drew a crowd to her
+studio; whilst, grimly enough, Nelson's Emma rose to be one of the
+famed lovers of romance, to sink into want, and so to death in
+loneliness and misery at Calais.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was at Naples, too, that Vigée Le Brun painted that portrait of
+Paisiello which she sent to Paris to the Salon, where it was hung as
+pendant to a portrait by David, and led to his high tribute to her
+genius, when, after gazing upon it for a long while, he said to his
+pupils: "They will think that my canvas was painted by a woman, and the
+portrait of Paisiello by a man."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Vigée Le Brun was now painting without cease.  The Queen of Naples, her
+two elder daughters, and the Prince Royal, all sat to her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During the first year of her exile the news from France had not been
+greatly alarming, and danger seemed to have been lulled.  But at Naples
+she was to hear tidings that caused her bitter grief.  First Neckar,
+finding himself out of touch with the king and the people and the
+Parliament, retired to Switzerland.  Then, unfortunately for the king,
+Mirabeau died in the April of 1791.  The king thenceforth resolved on
+escape.  The Royal Family made their ill-starred flight to Varennes; to
+be brought back to Paris as prisoners.  The constitutional party in the
+Legislative Assembly, at first dominant, soon became subordinate to the
+more violent Girondists, with their extreme wing of <I>Jacobins</I> under
+Robespierre and of <I>Cordeliers</I> under Danton, Marat, Camille
+Desmoulins, and Fabre d'Eglantine.  The Proscription of all emigrants
+quickly followed&mdash;and the name of Vigée Le Brun was written upon the
+lists.  The queen's enmity to Lafayette baulked, and completed the ruin
+of, the Royalist hopes.  He retired into exile, and sadly left the
+Royal cause to its fate.  On the 20th of April 1792 France entered upon
+her supreme struggle with Europe by declaring war.  On the night of the
+9th of August the dread tocsin sounded the note of doom to the Royal
+cause&mdash;herald to the bloodshed of the 10th of August.  Three days
+afterwards the king and the Royal Family were prisoners in the Temple.
+There followed the terrible September massacres.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The National Convention met for the first time on the 21st of September
+1792; decreed the first year of the Republic; abolished royalty and
+titles of courtesy; decreed <I>citoyen</I> and <I>citoyenne</I> in their place,
+and <I>tu</I> and <I>toi</I> for <I>vous</I>.  It also proved the enmity of the two
+wings of the now all-powerful Girondist party&mdash;the Girondists proper as
+against the <I>Jacobins</I> or <I>Montagnards</I>.  The conflict began with the
+fierce quarrel as to whether the king could be tried.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It was with sorrow at her heart that the exiled artist left Italy and
+journeyed into Austria.  Having spent three years in Italy, roaming
+from town to town, and being received with honour wherever she went,
+she turned her footsteps to Vienna, where she remained from 1792 to
+1795, her thirty-seventh to her fortieth years, again to be idolised,
+and painting hard the while.  "To paint and to live are the same word
+to me," she was wont to say.
+</P>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+PLATE VIII.&mdash;PEACE BRINGING BACK PLENTY
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+(In the Louvre)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="plate">
+It was shortly after her return from this journey into Flanders that
+Joseph Vernet decided to put down her name for election to the Royal
+Academy.  Her portrait of herself created such a sensation that her
+election became assured.  She had to paint the usual formal <I>tableau de
+reception</I>, and chose Allegory, painting her "La Paix ramenant
+l'Abondance," which, though a somewhat stilted affair such as Academies
+demand, is full of charm&mdash;and is still to be seen at the Louvre.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-070t"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<A HREF="images/img-070.jpg">
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-070t.jpg" ALT="Plate VIII." BORDER="2" WIDTH="725" HEIGHT="572">
+</A>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P>
+But these years in Vienna must have gnawed at Vigée Le Brun's heart
+like a fearful disease.  In her France her much-loved Marie Antoinette
+was going through terrible days.  The king was being tried for his
+life, and "Louis Capet" knew that he was a condemned man before he
+faced his accusers with the rare dignity and courage that keep his
+memory green.  He was condemned to death,&mdash;Orleans, "Philip Egalité,"
+voting with the majority amidst a murmur of universal horror even
+amongst the men who condemned the king.  Louis' head fell to the
+guillotine on the 10th of January 1793.  War with Europe followed; and
+the deadly struggle between the Girondists and Jacobins for supreme
+power.  The 27th of May saw the appointment of the terrible Secret
+Committee of Public Safety.  By June the Girondists had fallen.
+Charlotte Corday's stabbing Marat in his bath left the way clear to
+Robespierre's ambition.  The Jacobins in power, the year of the Reign
+of Terror set in&mdash;from July 1793 to July 1794, with Robespierre as lord
+of the hellish turmoil.  The famous "Loi des suspects" soon filled the
+prisons with some two hundred thousand miserable prisoners.  The
+scaffold reeked with blood.  During the year of the Terror the
+guillotine sheared the heads from fourteen hundred victims.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The unfortunate queen, Marie Antoinette, whose hair had gone white in a
+night, was tried as "the widow Capet," going to the guillotine with
+majestic serenity on the 16th of October 1793.  The Girondist deputies
+followed; also the despicable Egalité Orleans, who went to his doom as
+the dandy he was, blotting out his many sins in a final dignity.
+Amongst the many batches came the miserable Du Barry, shrieking with
+terror, to her awful death, which she had brought upon herself by
+foolishly advertising a reward for a robbery from her house of
+Louveciennes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then came strife amongst the Jacobins themselves.  Danton and
+Robespierre fought the bloodthirsty villain Hébert for life, and
+overthrew him; the Hébertists went to the guillotine like the curs they
+were.  Danton, with his appeals for cessation of the Terror, alone now
+stood between Robespierre and supreme power; Danton, Camille
+Desmoulins, d'Eglantine, and their fellows went to the guillotine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But other as able and resolute men had determined that Robespierre and
+his Terror must end; Robespierre went to the guillotine.  The
+Revolution of the Ninth Thermidor put an end to the Terror in July 1794.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was whilst at Vienna, in her thirty-ninth year, on the 3rd of June
+1794, during the Terror, that Vigée Le Brun took out her act of
+divorce.  And it was in this year that "citizen Le Brun" published in
+Paris his <I>Précis historique de la vie de la citoyenne Le Brun,
+peintre</I>!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In her fortieth year Vigée Le Brun went from Vienna to Prague; and,
+getting roaming again, passed through Dresden to Berlin and on to St.
+Petersburg, where she arrived in the July of this same year of 1795.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her welcome in St. Petersburg must have been very sweet to the
+wandering exile.  On the morrow of her arrival the Empress Catherine
+had her presented.  She found at St. Petersburg many of her old
+friends, fled from the Revolution.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To her all Europe became a second country; but St. Petersburg her
+second home.  Here, in fact, were larger numbers of those that had
+meant Paris to her than she could now have found in Paris itself.  She
+was besides a spoiled child of the Court.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her life at St. Petersburg was a very busy one.  She settled down at
+once to the industrious practice of that art that was breath and life
+and holiday to her&mdash;working from morning until nightfall, and happy in
+it all.  She painted something like forty-eight portraits in St.
+Petersburg.  The Empress Catherine, now an old woman, was to have sat
+to her, and had appointed the day and hour, but her "to-day at eight"
+was not to be; apoplexy struck down her good-will; she was found dead
+in her room.  The six years in St. Petersburg were amongst the happiest
+years of the artist's life, and the richest for her fortunes.  Her
+reception into the Academy of St. Petersburg was almost a State triumph.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Meanwhile, the armies of France were winning the respect of the world
+by their gallantry and skill in war.  The 23rd of September 1795 saw
+France ruled by the Directory.  The 5th of October, the "Day of the
+Sections," led to Napoleon Bonaparte's employment as second in command
+of the army&mdash;the young general was soon commander-in-chief.  And France
+thenceforth advanced, with all the genius of her race to that splendid
+and astounding recovery of her fortunes and to that greatness which
+became the wonder of the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Revolution of the 18th and 19th of Brumaire (9th and 10th November
+1799) ended the Directory and set the people's idol, Napoleon
+Bonaparte, at the helm of her mighty State as First Consul.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was now little need&mdash;indeed there had not been for some time any
+need&mdash;for Vigée Le Brun to remain an exile; but, as a matter of fact,
+exile she had found to be so sweet a thing, so magnificent and
+perpetual a triumph, so delightful an existence, that Paris had early
+ceased to call her.  Her experience with her rascally husband scarcely
+beckoned her back to her old home; she was now sole mistress of her
+considerable earnings.  Besides, the Paris of her delight had been the
+Paris of Marie Antoinette&mdash;aristocratic Paris.  Where was that Paris to
+be found?  The personages and the atmosphere and the palaces and homes
+of all that Paris meant to her were gone into thin air&mdash;a sad memory.
+During her exile her mother had died; her last link with Paris died
+with her.  She probably rarely gave the city of her youth's delight a
+thought, and likely enough never would have given it another serious
+one, had not destiny now struck her a blow which she bitterly resented;
+but which she should have foreseen to be as inevitable as death.  Her
+daughter betrothed herself to, and married, a Russian, M. Nigris,
+secretary to the Count Czernicheff.  Vigée Le Brun had been sorely
+tempted to oppose the match, for she foresaw that the girl would find
+no happiness in the union.  She had poured out upon her child all the
+passionate love that had been so miserably thwarted in her own
+marriage.  It had been more than bitterness to her to note that whilst
+her love for her girl increased, the girl's love for her seemed to
+dwindle.  It was the bitterest blow that Vigée Le Brun had ever known;
+and she had been struck more than once.  It turned the wanderer's eyes
+homewards to her wrecked Paris.  Russia was no longer a delight to her.
+She became restless.  The wander-fever came upon her; she got roaming;
+she went to Moscow for five or six months; but she could not
+settle&mdash;she decided to leave Russia.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The people amongst whom she had lived so long showed their affection,
+and personally appealed to her to make her home amongst them.  The
+grandees went to her and told her of the sorrow that the news of her
+going had brought to them.  The Emperor Alexander the First, himself,
+begged her not to leave them.  She fenced all their kindnesses by
+promising to return soon.  But during the forty years that remained to
+her she never set foot again in her "second home."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In her forty-sixth year Vigée Le Brun left Russia, and turned her face
+towards Paris; she crossed the border into Germany and halted a short
+while in Berlin to paint a few portraits, and in order to go to Potsdam
+to paint the Queen of Prussia.  On leaving Berlin she narrowly escaped
+losing her diamonds and gold, a servant of the inn making an attempt to
+force open the baggage that contained them.  From Berlin she roamed to
+Dresden, where she seems to have hesitated, reluctant to bend her steps
+towards Paris, yet torn with desire to go.  As she came nearer to
+France her desire to return conflicted with her horror at the memories
+which the tragedy and wreckage of the Terror raised like ghouls in her
+imagination&mdash;every well-loved spot would now bear witness to her of the
+ghastly crimes that had swept away her old friends, their once masters
+and mistresses.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+VI
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE END
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+At last, the year after Napoleon, with great pomp, took up his official
+residence as First Consul at the palace of the Tuileries, Vigée Le Brun
+set foot on French soil after twelve years splendid exile, carrying
+with her a considerable fortune.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The egregious Le Brun seems to have been reconciled, for he took a
+leading part in her reception. As she stepped out of the carriage she
+found herself in the arms of her brother and his wife, amidst tears of
+joy&mdash;with Le Brun in attendance.  In her home, which was gay with
+flowers, everything else was exactly as she had left it, except that
+above her bed was a crown of golden stars set there by "citizen Le
+Brun."  The long-suffering Vigée Le Brun was deeply touched; but could
+not forget that the unconscious wag had made her pay dearly for the
+golden stars.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Concerts and ovations greeted the returned exile; but it was all a
+strange world.  A few old friends&mdash;and the rest, kindly strangers.  She
+grew restless, and in six months was setting out for London.  Here she
+found herself amongst hosts of old friends; and the doors of the great,
+as everywhere, thrown open to her.  She painted George the Fourth and
+Byron amongst many others.  The rage for portraits by her kept her in
+England for three years; and it was her fiftieth year (1805) before she
+returned by way of Holland and Belgium into France.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But in the midst of the great sea of adventure that swept France along
+under Napoleon she seems never to have got her bearings.  She roamed to
+Switzerland twice, and painted some two hundred pastel landscapes of
+its scenery.  It was during her first visit thereto that she met and
+painted Madame de Staël as "Corinne."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The years were increasing, the fever for travel cooled, and Vigée Le
+Brun, buying a house at Louveciennes, thenceforth passed her days
+between her country-house and town-mansion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Death began to make gaps amongst such old friendships as the guillotine
+had spared to her.  Le Brun died in 1813; her daughter in 1819; her
+brother the following year.  Her art began to fail her.  But her
+closing years were illumined by the affection and care of her two
+nieces, Madame de Rivière and Madame Trippier le Franc.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At five of the morning of the 30th of March in 1842, she died in her
+apartment at No.  29 Rue St.  Lazare, in her eighty-seventh year; and
+was buried according to her wish at Louveciennes, where, in the church,
+still hangs the picture of "Ste.  Genevieve" painted by her.  Even her
+poor dead body could not sleep where she had willed; she was destined
+to gentle exile even after death.  Her remains were moved to the new
+cemetery, and the simple tomb was again set up over them, whereon one
+may see a palette and brushes chiselled at its summit, and the grim
+words: "Here, at last, I rest."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07"></A>
+
+<H3>
+IN THE SAME SERIES
+</H3>
+
+<PRE>
+ARTIST.                    AUTHOR.
+
+VELAZQUEZ.                 S. L. BENSUSAN.
+REYNOLDS.                  S. L. BENSUSAN.
+TURNER.                    C. LEWIS HIND.
+ROMNEY.                    C. LEWIS HIND.
+GREUZE.                    ALYS EYRE MACKLIN.
+BOTTICELLI.                HENRY B. BINNS.
+ROSSETTI.                  LUCIEN PISSARRO.
+BELLINI.                   GEORGE HAY.
+FRA ANGELICO.              JAMES MASON.
+REMBRANDT.                 JOSEF ISRAELS.
+LEIGHTON.                  A. LYS BALDRY.
+RAPHAEL.                   PAUL G. KONODY.
+HOLMAN HUNT.               MARY E. COLERIDGE.
+TITIAN.                    S. L. BENSUSAN.
+CARLO DOLCI.               GEORGE HAY.
+LUINI.                     JAMES MASON.
+TINTORETTO.                S. L. BENSUSAN.
+
+<I>Others in Preparation.</I>
+</PRE>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Vigée Le Brun, by Haldane MacFall
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Vigee Le Brun, by Haldane MacFall
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Vigee Le Brun
+
+Author: Haldane MacFall
+
+Release Date: October 22, 2009 [EBook #30314]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIGEE LE BRUN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Cover art]
+
+
+
+
+
+  MASTERPIECES
+  IN COLOUR
+  EDITED BY --
+  T. LEMAN HARE
+
+
+
+VIGEE LE BRUN
+
+1755-1842
+
+
+
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE I.--MARIE ANTOINETTE.  Frontispiece
+
+(At Versailles)
+
+The first portrait that Vigee Le Brun painted, in her twenty-fourth
+year (1779) of Marie Antoinette.  Here is no hint of the tragedy that
+was to overwhelm the handsome young daughter of Austria; all was as yet
+but gaiety and roses and sunshine and pleasant airs, and the glamour
+that hovers about a throne.  But there are signs of the imperious
+temper of her house, combined with the levity and frivolity of manners
+which were so early to make her unpopular.
+
+[Illustration: Plate I.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+
+
+
+Vigee Le Brun
+
+
+BY HALDANE MACFALL
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT
+
+REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Title page art]
+
+
+
+
+LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
+
+NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.
+
+1907
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   I. The Beginnings
+  II. The Wonderful Child
+ III. Marriage and Motherhood
+  IV. Marie Antoinette
+   V. Sweet Exile
+  VI. The End
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Plate
+
+    I. Marie Antoinette  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Frontispiece
+         At Versailles
+
+   II. Madame Vigee Le Brun and Child
+         In the Louvre
+
+  III. Madame Vigee Le Brun and Child
+         In the Louvre
+
+   IV. Portrait of Madame Vigee Le Brun
+         In the National Gallery, London
+
+    V. The two elder Children of Marie Antoinette
+         At Versailles
+
+   VI. Portrait of Madame Mole-Raymond
+         In the Louvre
+
+  VII. Marie Antoinette and her Children
+         At Versailles
+
+ VIII. Peace bringing back Plenty
+         In the Louvre
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Vigee Le Brun]
+
+I
+
+THE BEGINNINGS
+
+In Paris, in the Rue Coquilliere, Louis the Fifteenth being King of
+France--or rather the Pompadour holding sway thereover--there lived a
+witty, amiable fellow who plied the art of painting portraits in oils
+and pastels after the mediocre fashion that is called "pleasing." This
+Louis Vigee and his wife, Jeanne Maissin, moved in the genial
+enthusiastic circle of the lesser artists, passing through their sober
+day without undue excitement; for fame and wealth and the prizes of
+life were not for them.  Boucher was lord of art; and La Tour and
+Greuze and Chardin were at the height of their genius; but honest Louis
+Vigee could but plod on at his pleasing portraits, and sigh that the
+gods had not borne to him the immortal flame.
+
+Yet he was to come near to the glory of it--nearer than he thought.
+'Twas a pity that he was robbed of the splendour of basking in the
+reflected radiance, and by a fish's bone.
+
+It was to have its beginning in that year after the indolent but
+obstinate king, having fallen foul of his Parliaments in his game of
+facing-both-ways in the bitter strife 'twixt Church and people, patched
+up a peace with the Parliament men.
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE II.--MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN AND CHILD
+
+(In the Louvre)
+
+In Vigee Le Brun's portrait of herself and her child we see in full
+career the Greek ideals that were come upon France--a France weary of
+light trifling with life, and of mere butterfly flitting from flower to
+flower.
+
+[Illustration: Plate II.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+Our worthy mediocre Vigee could remember the banished Parliament
+re-entering Paris in triumph on that fourth day of September in 1754
+amidst the exultant shouts of the people; the clergy looking on with a
+scowl the while.  On that same day was born to the Dauphin a son--the
+little fellow called the Duke de Berry--whom we shall soon see
+ascending the throne as the ill-starred Louis the Sixteenth, for the
+Dauphin was to be taken before the old king died.
+
+Honest waggish Vigee, painting industriously at his pleasing portraits,
+would recall it well; since, early in the following year, there was
+that to happen under his own modest roof which was to bring fame to his
+name, though he should not live to bask in its full glow.
+
+On the 10th of April 1755 there was born to him a little girl-child,
+whom they christened Elizabeth Louise Vigee, or as she herself wrote it
+across the title-page of her _Souvenirs_, Louise Elizabeth Vigee.  Into
+her little fingers Destiny set the skill that had been denied to her
+father; the flame was given to her.  And by the whimsy of things, there
+was also born in far-away Vienna, in this same year of 1755, in the
+palace of the Emperors of Austria, a little princess whom they
+christened Marie Antoinette; who was to marry the little seven-month
+old princeling that lay sucking his thumb in the Royal palace near by,
+and thereby to become future Queen of France.
+
+Like Francois Boucher, the great painter to the king, Elizabeth Vigee
+came to the pretty business with the advantage of being an artist's
+child; like him, she received her first lessons at an early age from
+her father; and, like him, she moved from earliest childhood in an
+atmosphere of art and artists.
+
+From her father she inherited a talent and taste for art, an amiable
+temper, a gift of wit; from her mother, a very handsome woman, she was
+dowered with a beauty for which she was as remarkable, and to which her
+many portraits of herself bear abundant witness.  From very childhood
+she began to display the proofs of her inheritance--that happy
+disposition and that charm of manner that were to make her one of the
+most winsome personalities of her time.  At the convent to which her
+parents sent her in her tenth year she fell to drawing on the margins
+of her books, filling them with little portrait-heads--an incessant
+habit that set her teachers grumbling at her lack of respect towards
+grammar and history.  But to her delighted father the grumbles were
+matter for laughter; in him she found an ally who was hugely proud to
+discover in his girl an inheritor of his gifts.  It is told of the fond
+father that the girl having taken to him one day a drawing, Vigee cried
+out exultantly: "You will be a painter, my girl, or there never was
+one!"
+
+Brought up, as the child was, in the world of artists, with the aims
+and ambitions and enthusiasms of artists for her very breath, she could
+not fail to find in such a world, besides the encouragement which was
+prodigally bestowed upon so young and promising a talent, the teaching
+needful to develop her powers.  Amongst the artists who were on
+friendly terms with the girl's father, and of whom Doyen was the most
+intimate, was Davesne, a member and deputy professor of the Academy of
+St. Luke--he who afterwards claimed to have taught the little Elizabeth
+the elements of painting.  Davesne's lessons were at best but few, and
+seem to have been limited to showing the eager child how to set a
+palette.  The girl was in fact picking up the crumbs that fell from
+many tables; at any rate she showed astoundingly precocious industry
+and gifts, and was soon making quite a stir amongst the painter-folk,
+and becoming a source of pride to her father.
+
+Vigee, however, was only destined to guide and encourage the child
+towards the path; he died on the 9th of May 1768 from swallowing a fish
+bone.  Little Elizabeth was but thirteen years old when this first
+great grief fell upon her.
+
+That was a strange world in which the child stood bewildered at the
+baffling cruelty of human destiny--this eighteenth-century France.  The
+Pompadour had died in the child's ninth year; her dogged and persistent
+enemy, the Dauphin, the year after her; the neglected queen now
+followed the Pompadour to the grave in the June of this same year that
+left little Elizabeth fatherless.
+
+Under the scandals of the Court, and the tyranny and corruption of the
+nobility and clergy, the French people were no longer concealing their
+distress under courtly phrases, nor groaning in secret.  The ideas of
+the new philosophers were penetrating and colouring public opinion.
+They were beginning to talk of the great antique days of Greece, of
+heroes, and of virtue, and of living and dying like Romans.  Fickle
+fashion was turning her back upon the art of old Boucher, and upon
+Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses and pleasant landscapes and bosky
+groves, and was taking up her abode with heroes and amongst picturesque
+ruins.  The Parliament men were demanding rights, were indeed going to
+prison and into banishment for those rights; nay, was not Choiseul the
+great minister of France; and Choiseul's power was deep planted in the
+rights of the people and founded on Parliaments.  All France was
+watching for the dawn of liberty.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE WONDERFUL CHILD
+
+The thirteen-year-old child suffered a grief so poignant at the loss of
+her father, to whom she had been passionately attached, that it
+threatened to have the gravest consequences on her future; had it not
+been for her father's old friend Doyen, who, transferring to the girl
+the deep affection he had had for the dead man, urged the child to take
+up her brushes again--for she was already painting from Nature.
+
+It was now that she entered the studio of Gabriel Briard, an historical
+painter and member of the Royal Academy; a mediocre artist (though
+superior to Davesne, who claimed to have been her teacher), but he was
+a fine draughtsman.
+
+To Briard's studio she went with a little friend, a year older than
+herself, Mademoiselle Bocquet, who was to become like herself a member
+of the Academy of Saint Luke; a girl of a certain talent who, however,
+abandoned painting on her early marriage.
+
+The two girls tripped it to Briard's studio like a couple of
+school-children, demurely escorted by a servant, who carried their
+dinner in a basket; and, as they went to their daily task, be sure the
+quick intelligent girl heard more than a little scandal of the
+Court--indeed all Paris more than whispered of it--scandal big with
+meaning for France, and for little Elizabeth not least of all.
+
+The tears of the king's grief over the dead body of his queen were
+scarce dried when Louis the Fifteenth still further degraded the
+dignity of the throne of France--still more dangerously brought royalty
+into contempt by publicly acknowledging as his new mistress a young
+woman from the gutters, the beautiful, laughing, reckless spendthrift
+Du Barry, to whom one of the king's first gifts was Louveciennes, where
+Elizabeth was afterwards to meet her.  Before the year was out Choiseul
+fell; and for the remaining four years that were left to the king
+France was governed by the milliner Du Barry and her precious trio,
+D'Aiguillon, Terray, and Maupeou; and rushed towards the abyss.
+
+However, these things troubled our precocious Elizabeth but little as
+yet.  The girl grew rapidly in craftsmanship and in personal beauty.
+Indeed, she developed towards womanhood as early and as swiftly as in
+skill of artistry, being remarkable for her prettiness, her freshness
+and delicacy of colouring, and her elegance of figure--early displaying
+the airy wit that, with these abundant gifts of her fairy godmother,
+were so valuable an aid to the reputation which she was achieving by
+her artistry at a time when most children are in the schoolroom.
+
+Her advance was so astounding that every one was talking about the
+girl; and the moment soon arrived when her master saw the pupil passing
+him in skill of hand and reputation as a painter; gazing dumbfounded at
+the stream of the greatest celebrities and personages of the day
+flocking to the studio of a girl of but fifteen years of age.
+
+How strange a thing the weaving of the web of Destiny!  In this very
+same year there came out of Austria a fifteen-year-old princess of its
+Royal House, leaving the home of her forefathers in tears, and amidst
+the tears of a people that had grown to love the winsome child; for,
+Marie Antoinette was setting forth on her life's adventure as future
+Queen of France, a tragic wayfaring for a butterfly!
+
+Elizabeth Vigee's extraordinary rise into notice brought her the
+friendship and counsel of Joseph Vernet, who gave her most precious
+advice which was a beacon to her career all her years: "My child," said
+he, "do not follow any system of schools.  Consult only the works of
+the great Italian and Flemish masters.  But, above all things, make as
+many studies as you can from Nature.  Nature is the supreme master.  If
+you study Nature with care it will prevent you from picking up any
+mannerisms."
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE III.--MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN AND CHILD
+
+(In the Louvre)
+
+Vigee Le Brun painted another portrait of herself and her little
+girl-child; and she painted both, fortunately for her fame, when her
+skill was at its increase.  They stand out, with all their limitations,
+pure and exquisite as the Madonna and Child of Italy's finest
+achievement; for they were painted by a woman of genius with the
+passionate love of a child that is the wondrous heritage of woman--none
+the less religious in that it apes no show of religion.
+
+[Illustration: Plate III.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+Doyen and Greuze also helped her with suggestions; but she was from the
+beginning her own teacher.  Davesne and Briard only flattered
+themselves by claiming her tutoring.  The girl showed in no way any
+slightest sign of their influence.  Ardent and enthusiastic in her
+pursuit of art, she haunted the galleries and private collections, but
+above all she went to Nature.  Naturalness is by consequence a marked
+attribute of one who painted in this artificial age--in portraiture she
+largely escaped the conventional style, both its limitations and, be it
+also confessed, something of that great beauty of style and that superb
+decorative splendour that mark the handsome achievement of Nattier and
+Drouais and their fellows.  Nor must it be forgotten that the realism
+claimed by the later years, and the naturalism claimed for this girl's
+art, were already to be seen in full career in the master-work of La
+Tour in portraiture, and in the still-life of Chardin.  This girl's
+genius never reached to the force of La Tour, nor the superb handling
+or colour-sense or vigour of Chardin, but she painted with rare skill
+the eminent women of her day and, with near as remarkable a skill, more
+than one man; her loss would have left a serious gap in the statement
+of the French genius of the end of the seventeen hundreds.
+
+It has been a custom too long indulged in by literary critics to praise
+her at the expense of Boucher's "conventionality"; but she never
+painted a portrait that surpassed the Wallace "Pompadour" or the
+"Infant Orleans," to say nothing of other rare portraits from Boucher's
+easel.  To set her up in rivalry against one of the greatest decorative
+artists of the years is but to give her an ugly fall.  The astounding
+part is not that she painted better than she did, but that she achieved
+what she did.
+
+But free from convention?  No.  She was a woman, and a painter of
+women--a painter of women from the woman's point of view that desires
+the world only to think of woman in her pose as woman, reticent,
+careful to screen the impulsive, most of all the vexatious, the
+violent, and the irregular moods of femininity's temperament from the
+eyes of the passer-by; always eager to show woman dressed for the part,
+and well dressed.  She was incapable of stating the deeps of character;
+and had she had the power, she would have looked upon it as something
+of an indecency--or worse, an indelicacy.  She would, in fact, have
+preferred to deny the deeps.  She sets her sitter ever in the
+drawing-room of fashion, draws a heavy curtain with a rattle between
+the drawing-room and the inner boudoir (the "sulking room"), slams the
+door on the bedroom, or any hint that there is a bedroom, before she
+cries "come in," to admit us to her studio; she prefers to show the
+woman in her properties as the creature of fashion, not in the intimacy
+of her inner living and full significance.
+
+This is as much and as absolutely convention as any tricking out of
+ladies as Dresden shepherdesses, and the more subtle in that it is the
+less obvious; as much convention as any painting of large eyes or
+rose-bud mouths.  It is as misleading as convention.  But it is the
+basis of a woman's life; and, in that, it is true.
+
+Boucher has been blamed for being conventional; is often sneered at as
+the arch-make-believe.  But when he painted women he painted them as
+men really see them with their masks off, and with all their allure of
+femininity.  This sneer of convention is a two-edged sword.
+
+In the year that they found Boucher dead, seated at his easel before an
+unfinished canvas of Venus, this girl of fifteen discovered herself
+celebrated; saw her studio invaded by the flower of the world of
+fashion; the women of the nobility at the French Court visiting her;
+the exclusive doors of the Faubourg St. Germain thrown open to her;
+princesses, duchesses, countesses, celebrities of the day and strangers
+of distinction her friends.  She was in close touch with the leading
+artists of her day--Le Moyne, blunt Quentin de La Tour, and the rest.
+
+The girl, in spite of her astounding industry, was soon wholly unable
+to carry out the orders for portraits which rained in upon her; her
+charm of manner and her increasing beauty added to the pressure of the
+siege of her admirers.
+
+A little while before her fifteenth birthday her mother married again a
+young jeweller, of the name of Le Sevre, a miserly fellow, who, under
+the pretext of taking them into the country, hired a little house at
+Chaillot, where they went with the girl for their Sundays; the thrifty
+stepfather planting its garden with the gay blossoms of the useful
+haricot-bean and the nasturtium.  He had a frugal mind.
+
+The petty tyrannies of the thrifty jeweller, his mean outlook on life,
+and his sordid aims, made of the habits and atmosphere of his class an
+even more uncongenial world for this brilliant girl to live in.
+Happily the pursuit of her art, and the friendship of that circle into
+which that art and her gifts and charming personality raised her,
+mitigated the tyranny of this sordid relationship.  And, to add to her
+relief, Madame Suzanne, wife of the sculptor, and a friend of her
+mother, would carry off the girl with her into the country; and it was
+during one of their walks at Marly that she met for the first time
+Marie Antoinette.
+
+On the 10th of May 1774, a month before Elizabeth Vigee's nineteenth
+birthday, King Louis the Fifteenth died of the small-pox--died without
+a friend, for he had dismissed the Du Barry in tears a short while
+before.  His body was hastily thrust into a coffin, and hurried at the
+trot through the darkness to St. Denis, for fear of attack from the
+sullen crowds that gathered to do it dishonour; so was he huddled away
+amongst the bones of the ancient kings of his race, unattended by the
+Court, and amidst the curses of his people.
+
+Louis the Sixteenth, son of Louis Fifteenth's only son, the dead
+Dauphin, ascended the throne of France in his twentieth year, a
+pure-minded, honourable young fellow, full of good intentions, and
+sincerely anxious for the well-being of his people; but of a diffident
+temper, timid, hesitating, and uncertain in decision, and under the
+influence of his young consort, the beautiful Queen Marie Antoinette,
+who had the imperious temper of her house, wedded to light and
+frivolous manners; she brought to her counsels a deplorable lack of
+judgment and a steadfast incompetence in knowledge of men.
+
+The good qualities of this young pair had been very well in private
+life; but France needed greater abilities for her guidance than the
+simple virtues.  It was a hideous part of the destiny of this young
+couple that they came to rule over a France that was passionately
+angered at the misdeeds of a king and his privileged class of nobles
+and clergy who had gone before them--of a class that had come unscathed
+through that reign, and were grown incapable of realising that they
+could not come unscathed through another.
+
+The Du Barry flown, and her precious trio of ministers with her, Louis
+recalled the crafty old schemer Maurepas to power from the banishment
+into which the Pompadour had sent him; but he otherwise began well by
+making Turgot his minister of finance.
+
+On the 25th of October in this 1774 that saw Louis Quinze and Marie
+Antoinette come to the throne of France, Elizabeth Vigee was elected to
+the Academy of St. Luke at nineteen years of age.
+
+She brought to her early successes a charming modesty and an utter
+absence of conceit or of pose that added greatly to her reputation, and
+paved the way to further honours.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD
+
+But early success was not to be without black care stepping into the
+triumphal car in her procession towards an early and wide fame of this
+charming and accomplished young woman of twenty.  Honours were easy.
+But the devil was in the machinery.
+
+Her family had lived in the Rue de Clery, opposite the hotel Lubert;
+thence they had drifted to the Rue St. Honore hard by the Palais Royal;
+they now returned to the Rue de Clery to the hotel Lubert itself.  Here
+it chanced that Le Brun, the expert, carried on a lucrative traffic in
+pictures.  His gallery attracted the pretty artist, who could study
+there at leisure the works of the great masters that passed through.
+
+The two families soon became intimate.  Le Brun carefully weighing the
+great advantages that such a union could bring to him, but entangled by
+his engagement to marry the daughter of a Dutch dealer in pictures who
+lived opposite to him, and with whom he had considerable business in
+works of art, beat about as to how he could marry Elizabeth Vigee.  The
+girl was living in the splendour of a circle to which her family could
+not hope to aspire; the picture-dealer belonged to the middle-class in
+which her own family moved.  Any day she might marry out of that
+middle-class world into the world of fashion.  He saw that the girl
+moved in, and was happiest in, a great world to which he had not the
+key.  He had the ambition to belong to that world, though his
+common-sense might have told him that he never could do more than hang
+about its outer courts.  He was a calculating blackguard, a man of
+loose life, and a vulgar fellow with vulgar ambitions.  He saw astutely
+enough that this girl was well on the high-road to considerable
+fortune.  The Dutch girl opposite necessitated wary walking.  He played
+the romantic lover, and before six months were run out he was pressing
+his suit, asking Elizabeth Vigee to marry him secretly.
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE IV.--PORTRAIT OF MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN
+
+(In the National Gallery, London)
+
+She saw at Anvers the famous "Chapeau de paille" by Rubens.  This
+canvas by Rubens clearly inspired her to the painting of the portrait
+of herself in a straw hat, where she stands bathed in the sunlight, her
+palette in her hand.  The painting of the flesh of the pretty face is
+exquisite, and in spite of intense finish is broadly conceived and rich
+and glowing in colour.  The clumsy drawing of the hand that holds the
+palette is the only defect in this, one of her masterpieces.  The
+picture has the added interest of revealing to us how Vigee Le Brun set
+her palette.  The thing is thrilling with life; and the little feminine
+conceit of wearing her black wrap is quaintly delightful.
+
+[Illustration: Plate IV.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+The girl seems to have had a presentiment of the misery that such a
+marriage would mean for her.  After long and serious hesitation she
+gave her consent.  It was perhaps due to a sense of being between the
+devil and the deep sea, for her sordid and miserly stepfather the
+jeweller must have been a sorry table-companion of her home life.  If
+she suspected the picture-dealer to be a rogue, she thought, likely
+enough, that the more genial rogue would be a pleasanter fellow to live
+with than the other.
+
+She married him secretly on the 11th of January 1776, on the edge of
+her twenty-first year.  It was not a wholly promising beginning, this
+that gave her the name that she was to immortalise--Vigee Le Brun.
+
+It was a sorry match.  It began in secrecy; she was to discover that it
+was founded on a treachery.  When the marriage was discovered it was
+too late to dissuade the girl from it; she had to listen to some plain
+home-truths as a Dutchman saw them, and to grim prophecies of the evil
+that would come of the business.  But he might have spared his breath.
+
+She was to have her ugly awakening.  She early discovered that Le Brun
+was a gambler, a rake, and a thoroughly dissolute and unscrupulous
+rogue.  It was not long before he had not only squandered his own
+fortune, but was playing ducks and drakes with every penny that she
+gained by her art and her untiring industry.
+
+She was soon to become a mother; the love that she had sedately allowed
+to go out to her disreputable and pretentious husband, and which she
+had early withdrawn in tatters, she now lavished upon this, her
+girl-child.
+
+Meanwhile, her reputation increased by leaps and bounds.  Her studio
+was simply besieged by "the Quality."  The Duchess of Orleans had to
+wait her turn a whole year before she could be painted.  Vigee Le
+Brun's praise was in every mouth.  She was sung in prose and verse; the
+poetasters ran to much doggerel of handsome intent, as was the fashion
+of the day.  Marquises and the rest of the scribbling folk tripped over
+halting feet to sing her charms and immortalise her art.  "L'orgueil de
+France" rhymed it to "la double puissance;" and "immortal crayon" to
+"admiration."  They spilled the rosy inks.  Le Brun, not the
+picture-dealing husband, but the poetical fellow who modestly nicknamed
+himself the Pindar of his age, plucked at the lyre with both hands in
+her honour.
+
+Nay, have we not the written record that Laharpe, uttering his rhymed
+discourse on the genius of women to a great gathering of the bloods and
+wits at the Academy, and bursting into violent poesies in announcing
+that Elizabeth, "the modern Rosalba, but more brilliant than she, weds
+the voice of Favart with the smiles of a Venus"--every one rose to
+their feet, "not omitting the Duchess of Chartres and the King of
+Sweden," and turning to the blushing Elizabeth, applauded her "with
+transports"!
+
+So much for France within the walls of the Royal Academy.  But France
+without!  The great minister, Turgot, baffled by the selfishness of the
+privileged classes, fell.  But Louis called to power near as good a
+man, worthy banker Neckar.  In an unfortunate hour for the Royal house,
+and against the will of the king, be it credited, and to the
+bewilderment of Neckar, the nation having gone mad with enthusiasm over
+the prospect of an alliance with Britain's revolted American colonies,
+war was declared against England, France undertaking not to conclude
+peace until the colonies were free.  The success of the revolted
+colonies made the Revolution in France a certainty.  The fall of Neckar
+and the setting up of the reckless and incompetent Calonne over the
+destinies of France brought the shout of the Democracy to the gardens
+of the king.  Vigee Le Brun's picture of the dandified man certainly
+does not show him a leader of great enterprises.  His reckless
+extravagance satisfied the nobles; it brought bankruptcy stalking to
+the doors of the king's palace.  The distress and sufferings of the
+people became unbearable.  The miserable scandal of the diamond
+necklace added to the discredit of the queen.  The Royal family and the
+Court sank further in the people's respect.
+
+As for Vigee Le Brun, she was come into her kingdom.  And it is during
+those twenty years, from shortly after her marriage until she was
+forty, that her best and most brilliant portraiture belongs, before the
+hardness and dryness of her later style showed signs of the decay of
+her powers.
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE V.--THE TWO ELDER CHILDREN OF MARIE ANTOINETTE--THE FIRST DAUPHIN
+(born 1781, died 1789) AND THE MADAME ROYALE
+
+(At Versailles)
+
+The little Dauphin of four years, and his seven-year-old sister, the
+Madame Royale, seated on a bank, the boy's hat thrown at his feet upon
+the flower-strewn ground--a work in which Vigee Le Brun's colour-sense,
+her fine arrangement, and her feeling for style reach to their highest
+flight.  The handsome boy was mercifully taken at the dawn of the
+Revolution; the girl was to know all its terrors.
+
+[Illustration: Plate V.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+To its earliest, freshest years belongs the first portrait that Vigee
+Le Brun painted, in her twenty-fourth year (1779) of Marie Antoinette,
+in which the young queen is seen with a large basket, and dressed in a
+satin gown, holding a rose in her hand--painted the year after the
+birth of her eldest child, the Madame Royale.  Here is no hint of the
+tragedy that was to overwhelm the handsome young daughter of Austria;
+all was as yet but gaiety and roses and sunshine and pleasant airs and
+the glamour that hovers about a throne.  But there are signs of the
+imperious temper of her house, combined with the levity and frivolity
+of manners, which were so early to make her unpopular.
+
+Vigee Le Brun was to paint her royal mistress close on thirty times
+during the next ten years, until the prison doors shut upon the Royal
+house of France; and there grew up between the two women a subtle and
+charming friendship that was to make the talented woman a dogged and
+convinced royalist to her dying day--indeed, the temperament of women
+needs small incense towards the worshipping of idols.
+
+Vigee Le Brun was rarely more happy in her art than in several of the
+many portraits she painted of herself about this time--more
+particularly the two famous pictures of herself with her little
+daughter.  "The Marie Antoinette with the Rose" is redolent still of
+the eighteenth-century France--the siecle Louis Quinze.  In Vigee Le
+Brun's portrait of herself and her child we see in full career the
+Greek ideals that were come upon France--a France weary of light
+trifling with life, and of mere butterfly flitting from flower to
+flower; here is that crying back to the antique spirit that was
+leavening the middle-class of France which was about to claim dominion
+over the land and to step to the foot of the throne and usurp the
+sceptre and diadem of her ancient line of kings as the Third Estate;
+and to come to power with violent upheaval, wading to the throne
+through blood and terror.  Here we see Vigee Le Brun, royalist,
+glorifying motherhood, her arms and shoulders bare in chaste nudity,
+her body scantily attired in the simple purity of Greek robes, her
+child in her embrace.
+
+Vigee Le Brun painted another portrait of herself and her little
+girl-child; and she painted both, fortunately for her fame, when her
+skill was at its increase.  They stand out, with all their limitations,
+pure and exquisite as the Madonna and Child of Italy's finest
+achievement; for they were painted by a woman of genius with the
+passionate love of a child that is the wondrous heritage of woman; none
+the less religious in that it apes no show of religion.  We see the age
+of free thought stating the innate religion of free thought; as
+Renaissance Italy painted paganism in religious disguise with the
+innate irreligion of its day.
+
+In all her portraiture one is struck by the fact that Vigee Le Brun
+took much pains to arrange the draperies in what she considered
+picturesque fashion rather than that she painted the ordinary gowns of
+her day as her sitters wore them on entering her studio.  And we have
+her own word for it in her _Souvenirs_ (wherein the careful record of
+each picture that she painted may be found) that the dress of most
+women of the time seemed ugly to her--as it does to so many artists,
+generally not the best, in all times--indeed, she used every ounce of
+tact that she possessed in order to "arrange" the draperies.  She
+sternly set her face against the use of powder and paint that the
+fashion of her century put upon complexions even of the most delicate
+beauties; and she always, when she could, arranged the hair of the
+women sitters.  She tells, not without pride, how, having persuaded the
+beautiful Duchess of Grammont-Caderousse to put off paint and powder,
+and to allow her to arrange her jet-black hair, drawing it down over
+the forehead and separating it over the brow and arranging it in
+irregular little curls, the duchess went to the theatre as she was, and
+created the fashion thereby, in spite of the fact that Vigee Le Brun
+could never persuade the queen to give in to her, Marie Antoinette
+replying to all her beguilings: "I shall be the last to follow the
+fashion; I do not wish them to say that I am trying to hide my huge
+forehead."
+
+Marie Antoinette was beginning to realise that all France did not fawn
+upon her with the courtier's bended shoulder or pretty speech.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+MARIE ANTOINETTE
+
+In her twenty-seventh year (1782) Vigee Le Brun made a journey into
+Flanders with her husband, who had gone thither picture-dealing.  The
+works of the Flemish masters that she there saw had a marked effect
+upon the increase of her art.
+
+She saw at Anvers the famous "Chapeau de paille" by Rubens; and had
+revealed to her the beauties of a sun-flooded figure, with the face
+painted in the golden glow of reflected lights under the shadow flung
+down over it by a large hat.  This canvas by Rubens clearly inspired
+her to the painting of the portrait of herself in a straw hat, where
+she stands bathed in the sunlight, her palette in her hand.  The
+painting of the flesh of the pretty face is exquisite, and in spite of
+intense finish is broadly conceived and rich and glowing in colour.
+The clumsy drawing of the hand that holds the palette is the only
+defect in this, one of her masterpieces.  The picture has the added
+interest of revealing to us how Vigee Le Brun set her palette.  The
+thing is thrilling with life; and the little feminine conceit of
+wearing her black wrap is quaintly delightful.
+
+Thenceforth her art has an added sense of style, a fuller statement of
+atmosphere; in her handling of paint and employment of colour she was
+soon to reach the very height of her achievement.
+
+It was shortly after her return from this journey into Flanders that
+Joseph Vernet decided to put down her name for election to the Royal
+Academy.  Her portrait of herself created such a sensation that her
+election became assured.  She had to paint the usual formal _tableau de
+reception_, and chose Allegory, painting her "La Paix ramenant
+l'Abondance," which, though a somewhat stilted affair such as Academies
+demand, is full of charm--and is still to be seen at the Louvre.  She
+was received into the Academy on the last day of May in 1783 in her
+twenty-eighth year, and thenceforward had the valuable privilege of the
+right to show at the Salon.
+
+Vigee Le Brun had not reached to such rapid and wide success, in spite
+of all her charm and youth and the defence that chivalry should grant
+to her sex, without setting jealous tongues wagging.  The "Peace
+bringing back Abundance" happened to be hung under a canvas by
+Menageot, "The Birth of the Dauphin"; and comparisons between the two
+pictures were aimed at creating a slander which there were only too
+many ready to believe; for it was supported by certain facts which fell
+into place, and took on a suspicious air when pointed to as supporting
+evidence.  This Menageot, who afterwards became Director of the Academy
+at Rome, lived in the same house as Vigee Le Brun; and rumour soon got
+agog to the effect that he was in the habit of painting, or at any rate
+putting the finishing touches to, her work, Pierre, at this time first
+painter to the king, had employed this slander in order to oppose her
+election to the Academy; he was the leading spirit of a cabal against
+her, as soon became known; for he was the victim soon afterwards of a
+satirical jingle that went the round of the studios.
+
+She was harassed also by the petty spites of enemies who did not
+hesitate to try and have her studio seized under the charge that she
+was painting without legal title since she had never been apprenticed
+to a painter.  And malignant tongues whispered it abroad that she never
+would have been elected to the Academy had it not been done at the
+command of the Court.  They made her very friendship with the queen a
+whip with which to lash at her.  She was now painting many portraits of
+the queen.
+
+Vigee Le Brun spent her entire day at her easel, from the time she
+arose in the morning, and she rose early, until the daylight went.  She
+gave up dining in the town, in order not to be drawn away from her
+work; and the temptation must have been strong for a young and charming
+woman so greatly in request.  But at nightfall she went out to social
+functions, and herself received the most brilliant and distinguished
+members of society and art and letters at her own house, giving
+concerts where Gretry, whose portrait she painted, and other celebrated
+musicians played portions of their operas before they were seen or
+heard upon the stage; whilst the grandees of the old noblesse and the
+famous wits frequented her house.
+
+Again, the report of her receptions got noised abroad; and envious
+tongues were soon exaggerating the extravagance and luxury in which she
+lived, descending to such childish tittle-tattle as that she lit her
+fires with bank-notes, that the number of her guests was so great and
+so distinguished that, for lack of seats, the marshals of France had to
+sit upon the floor; gossip and babble that were to cost her dearer than
+she thought, though she laughed it all away with a shrug of her pretty
+shoulders at the time.  It was concerning one of her six-o'clock
+suppers that a slander was started which was to be a serious menace to
+her in after years.
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE VI.--PORTRAIT OF MADAME MOLE-RAYMOND
+
+(In the Louvre)
+
+This famous painting of Madame Mole-Raymond, the pretty actress of the
+Comedie Francaise, is one of Vigee Le Brun's masterpieces.  Her brush
+is now at its most dexterous use; the laughing pretty woman is caught
+like a live thing and fixed upon the canvas as at a stroke as she trips
+across the vision, with muff upraised, smiling out upon us as she
+passes.  Vigee Le Brun never stated character with more consummate
+skill than here; never set down action with more vivid brush, catching
+movement flying.
+
+[Illustration: Plate VI.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+It was an age of small oratory.  Every man who could string a neat
+sentence together, scribbled or harangued.  It was boorish and an
+unfashionable thing not to be an author, a poetaster, a little orator,
+a critic, a dabbler in the arts.  At coffee-houses or clubs,
+wheresoever men foregathered, some fellow would mount a table and
+harangue his friends.  The bloods caught the vogue, little foreseeing
+that it made a hotbed for the airing of discontents, and for the
+parading of ideals which alone could blot out those discontents.  All
+took to it like ducks to the village pond.  There was much quackery;
+some honest noise.
+
+Now it so chanced that at Vigee Le Brun's there was a gathering at
+which Le Brun--"Pindar" Le Brun the poet--spouting a discourse,
+described a Greek supper.  The idea at once sprang up that they should
+have one straightway; they got up the cook and started to set the thing
+going, the poet guiding the making of the sauces.  Amidst the general
+merriment Vigee Le Brun suggested that they should dress for the
+fantastic affair in Greek costume, and arrange the tables and seats
+after the antique fashion.  So the jocular business went apace.  It was
+a merry party of Athenians that sat down to the feast--"Pindar" Le Brun
+wearing laurels in his ridiculous hair, and a purple mantle round about
+him; the Marquis de Cubieres tricked out with a guitar as a golden
+lyre; Vigee Le Brun being chief costumier to the frolic, draping
+Chaudet the sculptor and others in as near Greek fashion as could be.
+Vigee Le Brun, herself in white robes and tunic, and garlanded with
+flowers and veiled, seems to have presided over a rollicking gathering.
+The noise of the jollification got abroad.
+
+The banquet cost the frugal Vigee Le Brun some fifteen francs in all;
+but in the mouths of the spiteful the tale of its extravagance quickly
+grew.  A few days afterwards there was talk of it at Court; and the
+king was solemnly assured by "one who knew," that it had cost 20,000
+francs.
+
+This unfortunate Greek supper dogged her steps in the wanderings over
+the face of Europe that were to be her long exile.  At Rome she was to
+discover that it had cost her 40,000 francs; at Vienna it was to rise
+to 60,000; and when she reached St. Petersburg she was to find that,
+gathering volume on the long journey, it had increased to 80,000
+francs, when she scotched the lie and killed it; but not before it had
+served her a very ugly turn.
+
+The truth was that she was being made to share the unpopularity that
+had fallen upon the queen.  She was painting, and was on friendly terms
+with, not only the Royal Family, but with the unpopular ministers and
+servants of the crown, and with the noblesse, who in league with the
+queen were chiefly concerned in keeping the king from popular measures.
+She painted, according to the authorities, in 1785, in her thirtieth
+year, the portrait of Calonne though a parchment in the engraving from
+it bears the date 1787.  The portrait of the minister set slander going
+against the artist, as regards the vast sum paid for it.  The portrait
+of the seated minister ends below the knees; and it was of this picture
+of the weak Calonne, who clung so limpet-like to office, that Sophie
+Arnould, seeing it at the Salon, made the neat remark: "It is because
+he sticks to office that Madame Le Brun has cut off his legs."  But
+whether she received much or little mattered not much to Vigee Le Brun;
+her husband seized and squandered all she earned.  As a matter of fact,
+she received 3600 francs for the portrait from Calonne, sent in a
+handsome box worth 1200 francs--a couple of hundred pounds at the
+outside.  It was a small price compared to the sums she was now
+receiving for portraits; Beaujou, the financier, paid 8000 francs (say
+300 guineas); Prince Lubomirski 20,000 francs (L800)--not that the poor
+maker of these works gained thereby, for her precious picture-dealer
+husband had it according to his habit, and she had difficulty and a
+scene even to get two louis from the price when she asked the rogue for
+it.  However, her reputation ever increased.  She showed at this same
+Salon of 1785, in her thirtieth year, the portrait of the little
+Dauphin of four years and his seven-year-old sister, the Madame Royale,
+seated on a bank, the boy's hat thrown at his feet upon the
+flower-strewn ground--a work in which her colour-sense, her fine
+arrangement, and her feeling for style reach to their highest flight.
+It is perhaps the most wholly successful and most complete and masterly
+canvas of her long career.  It hangs in Versailles, a pathetic comment,
+this happy moment in the children's life, when the days looked rosy and
+all the world was a beautiful garden.
+
+At the Salon of 1787, in her thirty-second year, is record of a picture
+of "Marie Antoinette and her Children"; and of herself with her girl;
+and, amongst others, those of Mademoiselle Dugazon and of Madame
+Mole-Raymond.  This famous painting of Madame Mole-Raymond, the pretty
+actress of the Comedie Francaise, is one of Vigee Le Brun's
+masterpieces.  Her brush is now at its most dexterous use; the laughing
+pretty woman is caught like a live thing and fixed upon the canvas as
+at a stroke as she trips across the vision, with muff upraised, smiling
+out upon us as she passes.  Vigee Le Brun never stated character with
+more consummate skill than here; never set down action with more vivid
+brush, catching movement flying; she never stated life more truly nor
+with more exquisite tact than in this bright vision of a dainty woman
+of the theatre.
+
+Affairs in France were now in such a huddle that the State could not
+pay interest on the public loans.  Calonne could no longer disguise the
+serious business from himself or the king.  There was nothing for it
+but to call the Assembly of Notables.  They met at Versailles on the
+22nd of February 1787.  Calonne fell, to give place to his enemy the
+turbulent and stupid Cardinal de Brienne.  The Court was completely
+foul of the people when De Brienne threw up office in the midst of
+riots in Paris and throughout the country, and, in panic, fled to
+Italy, leaving the Government in dire confusion and distress.
+
+The king took a wise course; he recalled Neckar.  The convoking of the
+States-General now became a certainty.  Paris rang with the hoarse cry
+for the Third Estate.  The wrangle as to the constitution of the
+States-General became every day more dangerous.
+
+The last portrait that Vigee Le Brun painted of the doomed queen was
+the canvas that hangs at Versailles known as "Marie Antoinette and her
+Children," in which the queen is seen seated beside a cradle with the
+baby Duke of Normandy on her knee, the little Madame Royale at her
+side, and the small Dauphin pointing into the cradle.  When the doors
+of the Salon of 1788 were thrown open the painting was not quite
+finished; and for some days the frame reserved for it remained empty.
+It was on the eve of what was to become the Revolution, and the country
+was speaking now in no hushed whispers of the public deficit in the
+nation's treasury, and gazing bewildered at the bankruptcy that
+threatened the land.  The empty frame drew forth the bitter jest:
+"Voila le deficit!"  The little Dauphin's pointing at the cradle was
+not to be without its significance--for the little fellow was to die at
+the outbreak of the Revolution and his place was to be taken by the
+babe on his mother's knee--the small Duke of Normandy was to become
+Dauphin in his place, and, in some few years, with his little sister,
+was to be made a close prisoner in the Temple.  The king and the queen,
+separated from their children and each other, were to go out to the
+guillotine; the girl was to live through the seething hell of the
+Terror as by a miracle, and thereafter unhappily enough as the Duchess
+of Angouleme; but the fair boy, heir to one of the noblest heritages in
+all this vast world, torn from Marie Antoinette whilst the queen still
+lived, a prisoner, was to be handed to the tender mercies of the
+infamous Simon, jailor at the Temple, who was to train the frightened
+child to drink and swear and sing with piping treble the _camagnole_,
+until, hidden away in a tower of the prison, he was to die like a
+frightened hunted thing, his shirt not changed for months--die in
+darkness and squalor and in a filthy state.  The guillotine did no
+mightier act of simple godlike vengeance than the day it sheared the
+skull from the foul neck of cordwainer Simon.
+
+Marie Antoinette, in this the thirtieth portrait that Vigee Le Brun
+painted of her, is no longer the mere careless, gorgeous butterfly of
+some ten years ago when the little more than girl-artist first limned
+her features in the "Marie Antoinette with a Rose."  The ten years that
+have passed are ending in solemn seriousness for the thirty-third
+birthday of the French Queen.  The future is a threat.  The people are
+demanding rule by Parliament--are singing for it--writing broadsheets
+claiming it.
+
+It was about this time of stress and strain and anxiety at Court that,
+in 1788, Berger engraved so superbly one of Vigee Le Brun's greatest
+portraits, the consummately painted character-study, and exquisitely
+dainty colour-harmony of the Marchioness de Sabran.
+
+The elections to the States-General took place amidst indescribable
+excitement throughout all France.  The winter which went before the
+meeting of the States-General was terribly severe; it came on top of a
+bad harvest; the price of bread rose to famine pitch.  Neckar
+generously sacrificed a vast part of his private fortune to buy food
+for the hunger-stricken poor of Paris.  It was in national gloom that
+the States-General met at Versailles on the 5th of May in 1789.  That
+day sounded the knell of the Monarchy.
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE VII.-MARIE ANTOINETTE AND HER CHILDREN
+
+(At Versailles)
+
+The last portrait that Vigee Le Brun painted of the doomed queen was
+the canvas that hangs at Versailles known as "Marie Antoinette and her
+Children," in which the queen is seen seated beside a cradle with the
+baby Duke of Normandy on her knee, the little Madame Royale at her
+side, and the small Dauphin pointing into the cradle.  When the doors
+of the Salon of 1788 were thrown open the painting was not quite
+finished; and for some days the frame reserved for it remained empty.
+It was on the eve of what was to become the Revolution, and the country
+was speaking now in no hushed whispers of the public deficit in the
+nation's treasury, and gazing bewildered at the bankruptcy that
+threatened the land.  The empty frame drew forth the bitter jest:
+"Voila, le deficit!"
+
+[Illustration: Plate VII.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+In little over a month the States-General was become the
+self-constituted National Assembly; a few days later, on the 20th of
+June, the deputies took the solemn oath in the tennis-court--the _jeu
+de paume_.  At the queen's foolish urging the king fell back on force;
+filled Paris with troops under De Broglie; dismissed Neckar.  The
+people at once took to arms.  The 14th of July saw the fall of the
+hated Bastille.  On the 22nd the people hanged Foulon to the
+street-lamp at the corner of the Place de Greve--and thenceforth the
+terrible shout _a la lanterne!_ became the cry of fashion.
+
+Such was the dawn of the Revolution in the streets of Paris, upon which
+Vigee Le Brun's eyes gazed down terrified in her thirty-fourth year.
+
+Quickly followed the rumblings of the dark thunder-clouds that came up
+in threatening blackness behind the dawn--and which were about to burst
+with a roar upon reckless Paris.
+
+The king showed astounding courage and considerable capacity during
+these awful days; but his work was constantly thwarted and ruined by
+the Court party and the queen.  On the 3rd of October the officers of
+the regiment of Flanders were foolishly entertained at Versailles, and
+the whole Court being present, the white cockade of the Bourbons was
+distributed amidst rapturous approval, and the national tricolour
+trodden under foot.  The starving rabble of Paris knew it, by the next
+day; and headed by a band of frantic women, set out for Versailles on
+the morning of the 5th of October, under the leadership of the ruffian
+Maillard who had distinguished himself at the capture of the Bastille.
+They overran the palace.  The king again showed superb nerve; and the
+mob, abashed and admiring, calling "Long live the king!" withdrew to
+the courtyards.  The unfortunate brawl in the courtyard followed; and
+the mishap of the night.  The next day the Royal Family had to make
+their humiliating journey with the rabble to Paris.
+
+Small hope for Vigee Le Brun, unless she stole out of France, and at
+once.  She stood, indeed, in perilous plight.  Her relations with the
+Court, and with the nobility, made every hour that she stayed in Paris
+a greater danger to her life.  It was dangerous to go into the
+streets--dangerous to leave Paris--but for Vigee Le Brun more dangerous
+to stay.  She was a marked woman.  There was for her one sole way from
+death, and it was flight.  By delaying she risked also the life of her
+child.  Her friends begged her to be gone.  She took the girl; searched
+hurriedly for all the money she could lay hands on--her husband had
+taken all but eighty francs (some three guineas)--and, leaving her
+canvases where they stood unfinished, she passed out of the studio that
+had been all the world to her; the place where she had spent the
+happiest hours of her life.  A few days before, she had had to refuse
+to begin a portrait of the future Duchess de Noailles--to save her own
+head, not to paint those of others, was now become her single aim.
+
+On the 5th of October of this year of 1789, that fearsome day that saw
+the rabble marching to Versailles, Vigee Le Brun took her seat in a
+diligence with her little girl, seated between a thief and a jacobin;
+the diligence rattled along the cobbles of her beloved city, and out of
+the gates--in such fashion Vigee Le Brun left Paris and took the road
+for Italy.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+SWEET EXILE
+
+As she rattled out of Paris between her grim companions, Vigee Le Brun
+little thought that her exile would last a dozen years; but everywhere
+she went she was destined to be welcomed with honour; and wheresoever
+she roamed--and she ranged across the face of the land wellnigh from
+end to end of it--she was to receive the same ovations, meet with the
+same success, be rewarded with the highest honours.
+
+She went amongst strangers with but eighty francs in her purse out of
+all the fortune she had made by her dogged industry; she was to find in
+exile, not only a gracious home, but at last an immunity from the
+shameless squandering of her earnings by the disreputable thief whom
+she had married.
+
+At Turin, her first halting-place, she tarried but a short while.  She
+found that her name and fame had gone before her.  At Bologna no French
+citizen was allowed to stay for more than twenty-four hours; but for
+Vigee Le Brun permission was brought without her asking for it.  She
+spent three days gazing at the masterpieces of the Bologna School; and
+was made a member of its Academy.
+
+At Florence she was asked to paint her portrait for the celebrated
+collection of portraits of famous artists by their own hand at the
+Uffizi Gallery.
+
+At Rome the same impressive welcome awaited her.
+
+Here she was soon at work again, with palette and brushes, upon the
+portrait of herself, which she had promised to the Gallery at Florence,
+where it now hangs--one of the most exquisite heads she ever painted,
+sunny, smiling, happy, with youth come back to it.
+
+After eight months in Rome she moved on to Naples.  Here it was that
+she painted the portrait of Lady Hamilton, Nelson's Emma, reclining by
+the sea, holding a cup in her hand as a Bacchante.  Vigee Le Brun also
+painted her as a Sibyl--that picture which she took with her wherever
+she went, from town to town, and which always drew a crowd to her
+studio; whilst, grimly enough, Nelson's Emma rose to be one of the
+famed lovers of romance, to sink into want, and so to death in
+loneliness and misery at Calais.
+
+It was at Naples, too, that Vigee Le Brun painted that portrait of
+Paisiello which she sent to Paris to the Salon, where it was hung as
+pendant to a portrait by David, and led to his high tribute to her
+genius, when, after gazing upon it for a long while, he said to his
+pupils: "They will think that my canvas was painted by a woman, and the
+portrait of Paisiello by a man."
+
+Vigee Le Brun was now painting without cease.  The Queen of Naples, her
+two elder daughters, and the Prince Royal, all sat to her.
+
+During the first year of her exile the news from France had not been
+greatly alarming, and danger seemed to have been lulled.  But at Naples
+she was to hear tidings that caused her bitter grief.  First Neckar,
+finding himself out of touch with the king and the people and the
+Parliament, retired to Switzerland.  Then, unfortunately for the king,
+Mirabeau died in the April of 1791.  The king thenceforth resolved on
+escape.  The Royal Family made their ill-starred flight to Varennes; to
+be brought back to Paris as prisoners.  The constitutional party in the
+Legislative Assembly, at first dominant, soon became subordinate to the
+more violent Girondists, with their extreme wing of _Jacobins_ under
+Robespierre and of _Cordeliers_ under Danton, Marat, Camille
+Desmoulins, and Fabre d'Eglantine.  The Proscription of all emigrants
+quickly followed--and the name of Vigee Le Brun was written upon the
+lists.  The queen's enmity to Lafayette baulked, and completed the ruin
+of, the Royalist hopes.  He retired into exile, and sadly left the
+Royal cause to its fate.  On the 20th of April 1792 France entered upon
+her supreme struggle with Europe by declaring war.  On the night of the
+9th of August the dread tocsin sounded the note of doom to the Royal
+cause--herald to the bloodshed of the 10th of August.  Three days
+afterwards the king and the Royal Family were prisoners in the Temple.
+There followed the terrible September massacres.
+
+The National Convention met for the first time on the 21st of September
+1792; decreed the first year of the Republic; abolished royalty and
+titles of courtesy; decreed _citoyen_ and _citoyenne_ in their place,
+and _tu_ and _toi_ for _vous_.  It also proved the enmity of the two
+wings of the now all-powerful Girondist party--the Girondists proper as
+against the _Jacobins_ or _Montagnards_.  The conflict began with the
+fierce quarrel as to whether the king could be tried.
+
+
+It was with sorrow at her heart that the exiled artist left Italy and
+journeyed into Austria.  Having spent three years in Italy, roaming
+from town to town, and being received with honour wherever she went,
+she turned her footsteps to Vienna, where she remained from 1792 to
+1795, her thirty-seventh to her fortieth years, again to be idolised,
+and painting hard the while.  "To paint and to live are the same word
+to me," she was wont to say.
+
+=====================================================================
+
+PLATE VIII.--PEACE BRINGING BACK PLENTY
+
+(In the Louvre)
+
+It was shortly after her return from this journey into Flanders that
+Joseph Vernet decided to put down her name for election to the Royal
+Academy.  Her portrait of herself created such a sensation that her
+election became assured.  She had to paint the usual formal _tableau de
+reception_, and chose Allegory, painting her "La Paix ramenant
+l'Abondance," which, though a somewhat stilted affair such as Academies
+demand, is full of charm--and is still to be seen at the Louvre.
+
+[Illustration: Plate VIII.]
+
+=====================================================================
+
+But these years in Vienna must have gnawed at Vigee Le Brun's heart
+like a fearful disease.  In her France her much-loved Marie Antoinette
+was going through terrible days.  The king was being tried for his
+life, and "Louis Capet" knew that he was a condemned man before he
+faced his accusers with the rare dignity and courage that keep his
+memory green.  He was condemned to death,--Orleans, "Philip Egalite,"
+voting with the majority amidst a murmur of universal horror even
+amongst the men who condemned the king.  Louis' head fell to the
+guillotine on the 10th of January 1793.  War with Europe followed; and
+the deadly struggle between the Girondists and Jacobins for supreme
+power.  The 27th of May saw the appointment of the terrible Secret
+Committee of Public Safety.  By June the Girondists had fallen.
+Charlotte Corday's stabbing Marat in his bath left the way clear to
+Robespierre's ambition.  The Jacobins in power, the year of the Reign
+of Terror set in--from July 1793 to July 1794, with Robespierre as lord
+of the hellish turmoil.  The famous "Loi des suspects" soon filled the
+prisons with some two hundred thousand miserable prisoners.  The
+scaffold reeked with blood.  During the year of the Terror the
+guillotine sheared the heads from fourteen hundred victims.
+
+The unfortunate queen, Marie Antoinette, whose hair had gone white in a
+night, was tried as "the widow Capet," going to the guillotine with
+majestic serenity on the 16th of October 1793.  The Girondist deputies
+followed; also the despicable Egalite Orleans, who went to his doom as
+the dandy he was, blotting out his many sins in a final dignity.
+Amongst the many batches came the miserable Du Barry, shrieking with
+terror, to her awful death, which she had brought upon herself by
+foolishly advertising a reward for a robbery from her house of
+Louveciennes.
+
+Then came strife amongst the Jacobins themselves.  Danton and
+Robespierre fought the bloodthirsty villain Hebert for life, and
+overthrew him; the Hebertists went to the guillotine like the curs they
+were.  Danton, with his appeals for cessation of the Terror, alone now
+stood between Robespierre and supreme power; Danton, Camille
+Desmoulins, d'Eglantine, and their fellows went to the guillotine.
+
+But other as able and resolute men had determined that Robespierre and
+his Terror must end; Robespierre went to the guillotine.  The
+Revolution of the Ninth Thermidor put an end to the Terror in July 1794.
+
+It was whilst at Vienna, in her thirty-ninth year, on the 3rd of June
+1794, during the Terror, that Vigee Le Brun took out her act of
+divorce.  And it was in this year that "citizen Le Brun" published in
+Paris his _Precis historique de la vie de la citoyenne Le Brun,
+peintre_!
+
+In her fortieth year Vigee Le Brun went from Vienna to Prague; and,
+getting roaming again, passed through Dresden to Berlin and on to St.
+Petersburg, where she arrived in the July of this same year of 1795.
+
+Her welcome in St. Petersburg must have been very sweet to the
+wandering exile.  On the morrow of her arrival the Empress Catherine
+had her presented.  She found at St. Petersburg many of her old
+friends, fled from the Revolution.
+
+To her all Europe became a second country; but St. Petersburg her
+second home.  Here, in fact, were larger numbers of those that had
+meant Paris to her than she could now have found in Paris itself.  She
+was besides a spoiled child of the Court.
+
+Her life at St. Petersburg was a very busy one.  She settled down at
+once to the industrious practice of that art that was breath and life
+and holiday to her--working from morning until nightfall, and happy in
+it all.  She painted something like forty-eight portraits in St.
+Petersburg.  The Empress Catherine, now an old woman, was to have sat
+to her, and had appointed the day and hour, but her "to-day at eight"
+was not to be; apoplexy struck down her good-will; she was found dead
+in her room.  The six years in St. Petersburg were amongst the happiest
+years of the artist's life, and the richest for her fortunes.  Her
+reception into the Academy of St. Petersburg was almost a State triumph.
+
+Meanwhile, the armies of France were winning the respect of the world
+by their gallantry and skill in war.  The 23rd of September 1795 saw
+France ruled by the Directory.  The 5th of October, the "Day of the
+Sections," led to Napoleon Bonaparte's employment as second in command
+of the army--the young general was soon commander-in-chief.  And France
+thenceforth advanced, with all the genius of her race to that splendid
+and astounding recovery of her fortunes and to that greatness which
+became the wonder of the world.
+
+The Revolution of the 18th and 19th of Brumaire (9th and 10th November
+1799) ended the Directory and set the people's idol, Napoleon
+Bonaparte, at the helm of her mighty State as First Consul.
+
+There was now little need--indeed there had not been for some time any
+need--for Vigee Le Brun to remain an exile; but, as a matter of fact,
+exile she had found to be so sweet a thing, so magnificent and
+perpetual a triumph, so delightful an existence, that Paris had early
+ceased to call her.  Her experience with her rascally husband scarcely
+beckoned her back to her old home; she was now sole mistress of her
+considerable earnings.  Besides, the Paris of her delight had been the
+Paris of Marie Antoinette--aristocratic Paris.  Where was that Paris to
+be found?  The personages and the atmosphere and the palaces and homes
+of all that Paris meant to her were gone into thin air--a sad memory.
+During her exile her mother had died; her last link with Paris died
+with her.  She probably rarely gave the city of her youth's delight a
+thought, and likely enough never would have given it another serious
+one, had not destiny now struck her a blow which she bitterly resented;
+but which she should have foreseen to be as inevitable as death.  Her
+daughter betrothed herself to, and married, a Russian, M. Nigris,
+secretary to the Count Czernicheff.  Vigee Le Brun had been sorely
+tempted to oppose the match, for she foresaw that the girl would find
+no happiness in the union.  She had poured out upon her child all the
+passionate love that had been so miserably thwarted in her own
+marriage.  It had been more than bitterness to her to note that whilst
+her love for her girl increased, the girl's love for her seemed to
+dwindle.  It was the bitterest blow that Vigee Le Brun had ever known;
+and she had been struck more than once.  It turned the wanderer's eyes
+homewards to her wrecked Paris.  Russia was no longer a delight to her.
+She became restless.  The wander-fever came upon her; she got roaming;
+she went to Moscow for five or six months; but she could not
+settle--she decided to leave Russia.
+
+The people amongst whom she had lived so long showed their affection,
+and personally appealed to her to make her home amongst them.  The
+grandees went to her and told her of the sorrow that the news of her
+going had brought to them.  The Emperor Alexander the First, himself,
+begged her not to leave them.  She fenced all their kindnesses by
+promising to return soon.  But during the forty years that remained to
+her she never set foot again in her "second home."
+
+In her forty-sixth year Vigee Le Brun left Russia, and turned her face
+towards Paris; she crossed the border into Germany and halted a short
+while in Berlin to paint a few portraits, and in order to go to Potsdam
+to paint the Queen of Prussia.  On leaving Berlin she narrowly escaped
+losing her diamonds and gold, a servant of the inn making an attempt to
+force open the baggage that contained them.  From Berlin she roamed to
+Dresden, where she seems to have hesitated, reluctant to bend her steps
+towards Paris, yet torn with desire to go.  As she came nearer to
+France her desire to return conflicted with her horror at the memories
+which the tragedy and wreckage of the Terror raised like ghouls in her
+imagination--every well-loved spot would now bear witness to her of the
+ghastly crimes that had swept away her old friends, their once masters
+and mistresses.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE END
+
+At last, the year after Napoleon, with great pomp, took up his official
+residence as First Consul at the palace of the Tuileries, Vigee Le Brun
+set foot on French soil after twelve years splendid exile, carrying
+with her a considerable fortune.
+
+The egregious Le Brun seems to have been reconciled, for he took a
+leading part in her reception. As she stepped out of the carriage she
+found herself in the arms of her brother and his wife, amidst tears of
+joy--with Le Brun in attendance.  In her home, which was gay with
+flowers, everything else was exactly as she had left it, except that
+above her bed was a crown of golden stars set there by "citizen Le
+Brun."  The long-suffering Vigee Le Brun was deeply touched; but could
+not forget that the unconscious wag had made her pay dearly for the
+golden stars.
+
+Concerts and ovations greeted the returned exile; but it was all a
+strange world.  A few old friends--and the rest, kindly strangers.  She
+grew restless, and in six months was setting out for London.  Here she
+found herself amongst hosts of old friends; and the doors of the great,
+as everywhere, thrown open to her.  She painted George the Fourth and
+Byron amongst many others.  The rage for portraits by her kept her in
+England for three years; and it was her fiftieth year (1805) before she
+returned by way of Holland and Belgium into France.
+
+But in the midst of the great sea of adventure that swept France along
+under Napoleon she seems never to have got her bearings.  She roamed to
+Switzerland twice, and painted some two hundred pastel landscapes of
+its scenery.  It was during her first visit thereto that she met and
+painted Madame de Stael as "Corinne."
+
+The years were increasing, the fever for travel cooled, and Vigee Le
+Brun, buying a house at Louveciennes, thenceforth passed her days
+between her country-house and town-mansion.
+
+Death began to make gaps amongst such old friendships as the guillotine
+had spared to her.  Le Brun died in 1813; her daughter in 1819; her
+brother the following year.  Her art began to fail her.  But her
+closing years were illumined by the affection and care of her two
+nieces, Madame de Riviere and Madame Trippier le Franc.
+
+At five of the morning of the 30th of March in 1842, she died in her
+apartment at No.  29 Rue St.  Lazare, in her eighty-seventh year; and
+was buried according to her wish at Louveciennes, where, in the church,
+still hangs the picture of "Ste.  Genevieve" painted by her.  Even her
+poor dead body could not sleep where she had willed; she was destined
+to gentle exile even after death.  Her remains were moved to the new
+cemetery, and the simple tomb was again set up over them, whereon one
+may see a palette and brushes chiselled at its summit, and the grim
+words: "Here, at last, I rest."
+
+
+
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.
+
+
+
+
+
+  IN THE SAME SERIES
+
+  ARTIST.                    AUTHOR.
+
+  VELAZQUEZ.                 S. L. BENSUSAN.
+  REYNOLDS.                  S. L. BENSUSAN.
+  TURNER.                    C. LEWIS HIND.
+  ROMNEY.                    C. LEWIS HIND.
+  GREUZE.                    ALYS EYRE MACKLIN.
+  BOTTICELLI.                HENRY B. BINNS.
+  ROSSETTI.                  LUCIEN PISSARRO.
+  BELLINI.                   GEORGE HAY.
+  FRA ANGELICO.              JAMES MASON.
+  REMBRANDT.                 JOSEF ISRAELS.
+  LEIGHTON.                  A. LYS BALDRY.
+  RAPHAEL.                   PAUL G. KONODY.
+  HOLMAN HUNT.               MARY E. COLERIDGE.
+  TITIAN.                    S. L. BENSUSAN.
+  CARLO DOLCI.               GEORGE HAY.
+  LUINI.                     JAMES MASON.
+  TINTORETTO.                S. L. BENSUSAN.
+
+  _Others in Preparation._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Vigee Le Brun, by Haldane MacFall
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