Chapter 2
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the love that she had sedately allowed to go out to her disreputable and pretentious husband, and which she had early withdrawn in tatters, she now lavished upon this, her girl-child.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.
=====================================================================
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.
=====================================================================
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.