Chapter 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.

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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.

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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.