Vigée Le Brun

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!"

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.

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.