Chapter 3

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.

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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!"

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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.

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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.

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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._