Part 3

Boucher died a few months before that Christmas Eve of 1770 that saw Choiseul driven from power by the trio of knaves who used the vulgar but kindly woman Du Barry as their tool--indeed she refused to pull the great minister down until she had made handsome terms on his behalf; Choiseul was too astute a man not to recognise what lay beyond the shadow of her pretty skirts--nay, does he not turn in the courtyard as he leaves the palace to go into banishment, his _lettre de cachet_ in his pocket, and, seeing a woman looking out from a window at the end of an alley, bow and kiss his hand to the window where gazes out of tear-filled eyes this strange doomed beauty who has won to the sceptre of France? 'Twas four years before the small-pox took the king--four years during which this same Du Barry, with her precious trio, d'Aiguillon, Maupeou, and Terray, sent the members of Parliament into banishment--years that launched royal France on its downward rushing, with laughter and riot, to its doom, whilst the apathetic Louis shrugged his now gross royal shoulders at all warnings of catastrophe, which to give him due credit, he was scarce witless enough or blind enough not to foresee. Nay, did he not even admit it in his constantly affirmed, if cynical, creed that "things, as they were, would last as long as he; and he that came after him must shift for himself"? Ay; he came even nearer to the kernel of the significance of things, when, shrugging his no longer well-beloved shoulders, as the Pompadour had done, he repeated her cynical saying of "_Après nous le déluge_." It was to be a deluge indeed--scarlet red.

Wit and ruthless fatuity were the order of the day; these folk were wondrous full of the neatly turned phrase and the polished epigram. Most fatuous of them all, and as ruthless as any, was Terray--he who tinkered with finance, with crown to his many infamies the scandalous _Pacte de Famille_, that mercantile company that was to produce an artificial rise in the price of corn by buying up the grain of France, exporting it, and bringing it back for sale at vast profit--with Louis of France as considerable shareholder. Had not the owners of the land the right to do what they would with their own? 'Twas small wonder that the well-beloved became the highly-detested of the groaning people--he and his precious privileged class.

Yet Louis of France spake prophecy--if unwitting of it. The guillotine was not to have him. In 1774 he was stricken down with the small-pox, and the sick-room in the palace saw the Du Barry and her party fight a duel with Choiseul's party for his possession--never, surely, was a more grim, more fantastic warfare than that bitter intrigue to get the confessor to the king's bedside, that meant the dismissal of the favourite before he should be allowed to receive the Absolution--in which the strange blasphemy was enacted of the Eucharist being hustled about the passages, whilst the bigots strove against its administration, and the freethinkers demanded the last consolation of the Church. On the 10th of May the small-pox took his distempered body, "already a mass of corruption," that was hastily flung into a coffin and hurried without pomp, or circumstance, or pretence of honours to St. Denis--being rattled thereto at the trot, the crowd that lined the way showering epigrams not wholly friendly upon its passing; and was buried amongst the bones of the ancient kings of his race, unattended by the Court, and amidst the contempt and loud curses of his people.

Even the poor weeping Du Barry was gone, hustled from the palace at the wandering orders of the dying delirious king. D'Aiguillon also, and Maupeou and Terray were gone. And the Court was hailing the new king and his queen--ill-fated Louis the Sixteenth and tactless Marie Antoinette.

The scandalous levity of the privileged class of the day, and its ruthless vindictiveness when thwarted, had near done their work. A proud and gallant people touched bottom in humiliation. The pens of the wits and thinkers sent the new opinion broadcast amongst a people wholly scandalised and punished by the corruption of their governors. These writings made astounding and alarming way. The "intellectuals" were all on the side of the people--Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, d'Alembert, Helvetius, Condillac, the Abbé Raynal. With wit and sarcasm and invective and argument, they stirred passions, appealing to self-respect and dignity and honour and the innate love of freedom in the strong; they appealed to common-sense, to the craving for liberty in man's being, to the rights of the individual; and the printing-press scattered their wit and wisdom throughout the land to the uttermost corners of France. They sneered away false aristocracy, false religion. They wrought to overthrow the old order, and brought it into contempt. And they needed to manufacture no evidence. France had lain supine, a mighty people as they proved themselves when their right arms were freed--lain in chains under the heel of a king who had been capable of setting their necks under the feet of a trivial and foolish woman, whose nursery had been the gutter.

Yet Du Barry, when all her faults are set against her, suffered undue execration. She had no grain of ill-will in her nature. During her reign the Bastille received no prisoner at her ordering--vengeance was not in her. She was the tool of unscrupulous men; but she came between them and their base vengeances, and kept the Court free from the brutalities that the Pompadour meted out to her enemies without a pang of remorse. During the whole of her reign, she visited her old mother every fortnight, and lavished benefits on her kin--whom most women, thus suddenly raised to the noblesse, would have avoided like a plague. The scoundrels who made her their toy were responsible for every evil deed that she was accused of committing. And even the new king, whose sharp _lettre de cachet_, written two days after he came to the throne, banished her to a convent, soon relented, and allowed her to go back to her home at Luciennes. The Du Barry had striven to abolish the _lettre de cachet_; the new king brought it back, inaugurating his reign by having one sent to the woman whose gentleness and kindliness had shrunk from the accursed thing. It was a fit omen of the well-meaning but incompetent king's tragic reign which was about to begin.

To Fragonard these things were but tattle; yet the doing of them was to reach to his hearth; the consequences of them were to strip him bare and wreck him--he was to see his wife and womenkind dragging through the streets of Paris to beg bread and meat at the gates of the city. But the future was mercifully hidden from him. He was now at the height of his career; and was to taste wider success.

Fragonard's name will always be linked with that of his friend and patron, a wealthy man, the farmer-general Bergeret de Grandcour. His family visited at the rich man's houses in town and country.

Now the career of a rich man was incomplete without the making of the Grand Tour. At the least the gentleman of means must have roamed through Italy. And it was thus that, with Bergeret de Grandcour, Fragonard now made his second journey into Italy in his forty-second year.

Fragonard was delighted at the prospect of seeing his loved Italy again after twelve years. It was a family party--Fragonard and his wife, with Bergeret de Grandcour and his son, to say nothing of Bergeret's servants and cook and following. It was a happy, merry journeying in extravagant luxury.

Fragonard had aforetime gone into Italy as a penniless student and an unknown man; he now travelled in the grand style as the guest of a man of affairs, visiting palaces and churches, received in state by the highest in the land, dining with the Ambassador of France, having audience of the Pope, advising Bergeret de Grandcour in the buying of art-treasures. He tasted all the delights of great wealth. He went to a concert "chez le lord Hamilton," seeing and speaking with _la belle Emma_--Nelson's Emma. He stood in Naples; he tramped up Vesuvius. It was at Naples the news came that Louis the Fifteenth lay dying of the small-pox--a few days later the old king died.

The party at once turned their faces homewards, returning to Paris in leisurely fashion by way of Venice, Vienna, and Germany, only to know, at the journey's ending, one of those miserable and sordid quarrels that seem to dog the friendships of men of genius. Going to Bergeret de Grandcour's house in Paris to get his portfolios of sketches, made throughout the journey, Fragonard found to his amazement and consternation that Bergeret de Grandcour angrily refused to give them up, claiming them as payment for his outlay upon him during the Italian journey. The sorry business ended in the law-courts, and in the loss of the lawsuit by Bergeret de Grandcour, who was condemned to give up the drawings or to pay a 30,000 livres fine (£6000). The ugly breach that threatened to open between them, however, was soon healed by reconciliation; and Bergeret de Grandcour's son became one of Fragonard's closest and most intimate friends.

V

THE TERROR

Louis the Sixteenth, third son of the Dauphin who had been Louis the Fifteenth's only lawful son, ascended the throne in his twentieth year, a pure-minded young fellow, full of good intentions, sincerely anxious for the well-being of his people; but of a diffident and timid character, and under the influence of a young consort, the beautiful Queen Marie Antoinette, of imperious temper and of light and frivolous manners, who brought to her counsels a deplorable lack of judgment.

The Du Barry sent a-packing, and d'Aiguillon and the rest of their crew, the young king recalled the crafty old Maurepas who had been banished by the Pompadour, an ill move--though the setting of Turgot over the finances augured well. And when the great minister Turgot fell, he gave way to as good a man, the worthy honest banker, Neckar.

In a happy hour Fragonard was granted by the king the eagerly sought haven of the artists of his time--a studio and apartments at the old palace of the Louvre, as his master Boucher had been granted them before him.

Settling in with his wife, his girl Rosalie, his son Alexandre Evariste, and his talented sister-in-law Marguerite Gérard, he lived thereat a life almost opulent, making large sums of money, some eight thousand pounds a year, at this time. He joyed in decorating his rooms. He was the life and soul of a group of brilliant men who gathered about him, having the deepest affection for him.

His sister-in-law, Marguerite Gérard, was as gay and distinguished in manners, and as beautiful, as his jovial wife was dull and vulgar and coarse--the vile accent of Grasse, that made his wife's speech horrible to the ear, becoming slurred into a shadow of itself on Marguerite's tongue, and turned by the enchanting accents of the younger sister's lips into seduction. This girl's friendship and companionship became an ever-increasing delight to the aging painter. Their correspondence, when apart, was passionately affectionate. Ugly scandals got abroad--scandals difficult to prove or disprove. The man and woman were of like tastes, of like temperaments; it was, likely enough, little more than that. The girl was of a somewhat cold nature; and we must read her last letters as censoriously as her first--when, in reply to Fragonard, evil days having fallen upon him, and being old and next to ruined, on his asking her for money to help him, she, who owed everything to him, refused him with the trite sermon: "to practise economy, to be reasonable, and to remember that in brooding over fancies one only increases them without being any the happier." But this was not as yet.

Fragonard, happy in his home at the Louvre, free from cares, content amongst devoted friends, reached his fifty-fifth year when he had suddenly to gaze horrified at the first ugly hint that, in the years to come, he must expect to hear the scythe of the Great Reaper--know the passing of friends and loved ones. He was to reel under the first serious blow of his life. His bright, witty, winsome girl Rosalie died in her eighteenth year. It nearly killed him.

But there was a blacker, a vaster shadow came looming over the land--a threat that boded ill for such as took life too airily.

In an unfortunate moment for the royal house, and against the will of the king and of Neckar, the nation went mad with enthusiasm over England's revolted American colonies; and the alliance was formed that France swore not to sever until America was declared independent. It started the war with England. The successes of the revolted colonies made the coming of the Revolution in France a certainty. The fall of Neckar and the rise of the new minister, Calonne, sent France rushing to the brink. The distress of the people became unbearable. The royal family and the Court sank in the people's respect, and the people were no longer the people of the decade before--they had watched the Revolution in America, and they had seen the Revolution victorious. The fall of Calonne only led to the rise of the turbulent and stupid Cardinal de Brienne; and the Court was completely foul of the people when De Brienne threw up office in a panic and fled across the frontier, leaving the Government in utter confusion.

The king recalled Neckar. The calling of the States-General now became assured. Paris rang with the exultation of the Third Estate.

The States-General met at Versailles on the 5th of May 1789. The monarchy was at an end. In little over a month the States-General created itself the National Assembly. The Revolution was begun. The 14th of July saw the fall of the Bastille. On the 22nd the people hanged Foulon to the street-lamp at the corner of the Place de Grève--and _à la lanterne!_ became the cry of fashion.

Fragonard was in his fifty-seventh year when he heard in his lodging at the Louvre the thunderclap of this 14th of July 1789--saw the dawn of the Revolution.

The rose of the dawn was soon to turn to blood-red crimson. The storm had been muttering and growling its curses for years before the death of Louis the Fifteenth. It came up in threatening blackness darkly behind the dawn, and was soon to break with a roar upon reckless Paris. It came responsive to the rattle of musketry in the far West, hard by Boston harbour.

Fragonard and his friends were of the independents--they were liberals whom love of elegance had not prevented from sympathising with the sufferings of the people, and who had thrilled with the new thought. Fragonard's intelligence drew him naturally towards the new ideas; indeed he owed little to the Court; and when France was threatened by the coalition of Europe against her, he, with Gérard, David, and others, went on the 7th of September with the artist's womenfolk to give up their jewelry to the National Assembly.

But the storm burst, and soon affairs became tragic red.

There came, for the ruin of the cause of a constitutional monarchy and to end the last hope of the Court party, the unfortunate death of Mirabeau--the hesitations of the king--his foolish flight to Varennes--his arrest.

The constitutional party in the Legislative Assembly, at first dominant, became subordinate to the more violent but more able _Girondists_, with their extreme wing of _Jacobins_ under Robespierre, and _Cordeliers_ under Danton, Marat, Camille Desmoulins, and Fabre d'Eglantine. The proscription of all emigrants quickly followed. It was as unsafe to leave as to stay in Paris. The queen's insane enmity towards Lafayette finished the king's business. 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 morrow. Three days afterwards, the king and the royal family were prisoners in the Temple.

The National Convention met for the first time on the 21st of September 1792; decreed the First Year of the Republic, abolished Royalty and the titles of courtesy, decreed in their place _citoyen_ and _citoyenne_, and the use of _tu_ and _toi_ for _vous_.

The National Convention also displayed the antagonism of the two wings of the now all-powerful Girondist party--the Girondists and the Jacobins or Montagnards. The conflict began with the quarrel as to whether the king could be tried. The 10th of January 1793 saw the king's head fall to the guillotine--the Jacobins had triumphed. War with Europe followed, and the deadly struggle between the Girondists and Jacobins for supreme power. The 27th of May 1793 witnessed the appointment of the terrible and secret Committee of Public Safety. By June the Girondists had wholly fallen. Charlotte Corday's stabbing of Marat in his bath left the way clear for Robespierre's ambition. The Jacobins in power, the year of the Reign of Terror began--July 1793 to July 1794--with Robespierre as the lord of the hellish business. The scaffolds reeked with blood--from that of Marie Antoinette and Egalité Orleans to that of the Girondist deputies and Madame Roland, and the most insignificant beggar suspected of the vague charge of "hostility to the Republic." In a mad moment the Du Barry, who had shown the noblest side of her character in befriending the old allies of her bygone days of greatness, published a notice of a theft from her house. It drew all eyes to her wealth. And she went to the guillotine shrieking with terror and betraying all who had protected her. Then came strife amongst the Jacobins. Robespierre and Danton fought the scoundrel Hébert for life, and overthrew him. The Hebertists went to the guillotine, dying in abject terror. Danton, with his appeals for cessation of the bloodshed of the Terror, alone stood between Robespierre and supreme power. Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Eglantine and their humane fellows, were sent to the guillotine. Between the 10th of June and the 27th of July, in 1794, fourteen hundred people in Paris alone died on the scaffold.

Fragonard dreaded to fly from the tempest. It was as safe to remain in Paris as to leave the city. Any day he might be taken. Sadness fell upon him and ate into his heart. The old artist could not look without uneasiness upon the ruin of the aristocracy, of the farmers-general, and of the gentle class, now in exile or prison or under trial--his means of livelihood utterly gone. Without hate for Royalty or for the Republic, the artists, by birth plebeian and in manners bourgeois, many of them old men, could but blink with fearful eyes at the vast upheaval. Their art was completely put out of fashion--a new art, solemn and severe, classical and heroic, was born. For half a century the charming art of France of the eighteenth century lay wholly buried--a thing of contempt wherever it showed above the ashes.

Fragonard's powerful young friend David, the painter, now stood sternly watchful over the old man's welfare; and David was at the height of his popularity--he was a member of the Convention. He took every opportunity to show his friendship publicly, visited Fragonard regularly, secured him his lodgings at the Louvre, brought about his election to the jury of the Arts created by the Convention to take the place of the Royal Academy.

But the old artist was bewildered.

The national enthusiasm was not in him. The artists were ruined by the destruction of their pensions. The buyers of Fragonard's pictures were dispersed, their power and their money gone, their favour dissipated. Fragonard worked on without conviction or truth. The new school uprooted all his settled ideals. He struggled hard to catch the new ideas, and failed. He helped to plant a tree of liberty in the court of the Louvre, meditating the while how he could be gone from Paris--it was a tragic farce, played with his soul. The glories of the Revolution alarmed the old man. He saw the kinsfolk of his friends dragged off to the guillotine. He had guarded against suspicion and arrest by giving a certificate early in 1794, the year of the Terror, stating that he had no intention of emigrating, adding a statement of residence, and avowing his citizenship. He felt that even these acts were not enough protection in these terrible years. No man knew when or where the blow might fall--at what place or moment he might be seized, or on what charge, and sent to the guillotine. Friends were taken in the night. Hubert Robert was seized and flung into Saint Lazare, escaping death but by an accident. The state of misery and want amongst the artists and their wives and families at this time was pitiable.

Fragonard gladly snatched at the invitation of an old friend of his family, Monsieur Maubert, to go to him at Grasse during these anxious times of the travail that had come upon France.

Shortly after that Sunday in December when the Du Barry went shrieking to her hideous death at the guillotine, Fragonard, turning his face to the South of his birth, was rolling up amongst his baggage the four finished canvases of "The Romance of Love and Youth," and the unfinished fifth canvas, "Deserted," ordered and repudiated by the Du Barry. He bundled his family into a chaise, and lumbered out of Paris, rumbling on clattering wheels through the guards at the gates, and making southwards towards Provence for his friend's house at Grasse. Here, far away from the din and strife, Fragonard set up his world-famous decorative panels in the salon of his host, which they admirably fitted, painting for the overdoors, "Love the Conqueror," "Love-folly," "Love pursuing a Dove," "Love embracing the Universe," and a panel over the fireplace, "Triumph of Love." He also painted during his stay the portraits of the brothers Maubert; and, to keep his host safe from ugly rumours and unfriendly eyes, he decorated the vestibule with revolutionary emblems, phrygian bonnet, axes and faggots, and the masks of Robespierre and the Abbé Gregoire, and the like trickings of red republicanism.... His host was the maternal grandfather of the Malvilan, at whose death in 1903, the room and its decorations were sold to an American collector for a huge sum of money.

Meanwhile, able and resolute men had determined that Robespierre and the Terror must end. Robespierre went to the guillotine. The Revolution of the Ninth Thermidor put an end to the Terror in July 1794.

All this time the armies of France were winning the respect of the world by their gallantry and skill. The 23rd of September 1795, saw France establish the Directory--the 5th of October, the Day of the Sections, saw the stiff fight about the Church of St. Roch, and Napoleon Bonaparte appointed second-in-command of the army. The young general was soon Commander-in-Chief. And France thenceforth advanced, spite of the many blunders of the Directory, with all the genius of her race, to the splendid recovery of her fortunes, and to a greatness which was to be the wonder and admiration and dread of the world.

The Revolution of the 18th and 19th of Brumaire (9th and 10th of November 1799) destroyed the Directory and set the people's idol, Napoleon Bonaparte, at the helm of her mighty state.

VI

THE END