Chapter II: The Wonderful Child

The thirteen-year-old child suffered a grief so poignant at the loss of her father, to whom she had been passionately attached, that it threatened to have the gravest consequences on her future; had it not been for her father's old friend Doyen, who, transferring to the girl the deep affection he had had for the dead man, urged the child to take up her brushes again--for she was already painting from Nature.

It was now that she entered the studio of Gabriel Briard, an historical painter and member of the Royal Academy; a mediocre artist (though superior to Davesne, who claimed to have been her teacher), but he was a fine draughtsman.

To Briard's studio she went with a little friend, a year older than herself, Mademoiselle Bocquet, who was to become like herself a member of the Academy of Saint Luke; a girl of a certain talent who, however, abandoned painting on her early marriage.

The two girls tripped it to Briard's studio like a couple of school-children, demurely escorted by a servant, who carried their dinner in a basket; and, as they went to their daily task, be sure the quick intelligent girl heard more than a little scandal of the Court--indeed all Paris more than whispered of it--scandal big with meaning for France, and for little Elizabeth not least of all.

The tears of the king's grief over the dead body of his queen were scarce dried when Louis the Fifteenth still further degraded the dignity of the throne of France--still more dangerously brought royalty into contempt by publicly acknowledging as his new mistress a young woman from the gutters, the beautiful, laughing, reckless spendthrift Du Barry, to whom one of the king's first gifts was Louveciennes, where Elizabeth was afterwards to meet her. Before the year was out Choiseul fell; and for the remaining four years that were left to the king France was governed by the milliner Du Barry and her precious trio, D'Aiguillon, Terray, and Maupeou; and rushed towards the abyss.

However, these things troubled our precocious Elizabeth but little as yet. The girl grew rapidly in craftsmanship and in personal beauty. Indeed, she developed towards womanhood as early and as swiftly as in skill of artistry, being remarkable for her prettiness, her freshness and delicacy of colouring, and her elegance of figure--early displaying the airy wit that, with these abundant gifts of her fairy godmother, were so valuable an aid to the reputation which she was achieving by her artistry at a time when most children are in the schoolroom.

Her advance was so astounding that every one was talking about the girl; and the moment soon arrived when her master saw the pupil passing him in skill of hand and reputation as a painter; gazing dumbfounded at the stream of the greatest celebrities and personages of the day flocking to the studio of a girl of but fifteen years of age.

How strange a thing the weaving of the web of Destiny! In this very same year there came out of Austria a fifteen-year-old princess of its Royal House, leaving the home of her forefathers in tears, and amidst the tears of a people that had grown to love the winsome child; for, Marie Antoinette was setting forth on her life's adventure as future Queen of France, a tragic wayfaring for a butterfly!

Elizabeth Vigee's extraordinary rise into notice brought her the friendship and counsel of Joseph Vernet, who gave her most precious advice which was a beacon to her career all her years: "My child," said he, "do not follow any system of schools. Consult only the works of the great Italian and Flemish masters. But, above all things, make as many studies as you can from Nature. Nature is the supreme master. If you study Nature with care it will prevent you from picking up any mannerisms."

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PLATE III.--MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN AND CHILD

(In the Louvre)

Vigee 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.

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Doyen and Greuze also helped her with suggestions; but she was from the beginning her own teacher. Davesne and Briard only flattered themselves by claiming her tutoring. The girl showed in no way any slightest sign of their influence. Ardent and enthusiastic in her pursuit of art, she haunted the galleries and private collections, but above all she went to Nature. Naturalness is by consequence a marked attribute of one who painted in this artificial age--in portraiture she largely escaped the conventional style, both its limitations and, be it also confessed, something of that great beauty of style and that superb decorative splendour that mark the handsome achievement of Nattier and Drouais and their fellows. Nor must it be forgotten that the realism claimed by the later years, and the naturalism claimed for this girl's art, were already to be seen in full career in the master-work of La Tour in portraiture, and in the still-life of Chardin. This girl's genius never reached to the force of La Tour, nor the superb handling or colour-sense or vigour of Chardin, but she painted with rare skill the eminent women of her day and, with near as remarkable a skill, more than one man; her loss would have left a serious gap in the statement of the French genius of the end of the seventeen hundreds.

It has been a custom too long indulged in by literary critics to praise her at the expense of Boucher's "conventionality"; but she never painted a portrait that surpassed the Wallace "Pompadour" or the "Infant Orleans," to say nothing of other rare portraits from Boucher's easel. To set her up in rivalry against one of the greatest decorative artists of the years is but to give her an ugly fall. The astounding part is not that she painted better than she did, but that she achieved what she did.

But free from convention? No. She was a woman, and a painter of women--a painter of women from the woman's point of view that desires the world only to think of woman in her pose as woman, reticent, careful to screen the impulsive, most of all the vexatious, the violent, and the irregular moods of femininity's temperament from the eyes of the passer-by; always eager to show woman dressed for the part, and well dressed. She was incapable of stating the deeps of character; and had she had the power, she would have looked upon it as something of an indecency--or worse, an indelicacy. She would, in fact, have preferred to deny the deeps. She sets her sitter ever in the drawing-room of fashion, draws a heavy curtain with a rattle between the drawing-room and the inner boudoir (the "sulking room"), slams the door on the bedroom, or any hint that there is a bedroom, before she cries "come in," to admit us to her studio; she prefers to show the woman in her properties as the creature of fashion, not in the intimacy of her inner living and full significance.

This is as much and as absolutely convention as any tricking out of ladies as Dresden shepherdesses, and the more subtle in that it is the less obvious; as much convention as any painting of large eyes or rose-bud mouths. It is as misleading as convention. But it is the basis of a woman's life; and, in that, it is true.

Boucher has been blamed for being conventional; is often sneered at as the arch-make-believe. But when he painted women he painted them as men really see them with their masks off, and with all their allure of femininity. This sneer of convention is a two-edged sword.

In the year that they found Boucher dead, seated at his easel before an unfinished canvas of Venus, this girl of fifteen discovered herself celebrated; saw her studio invaded by the flower of the world of fashion; the women of the nobility at the French Court visiting her; the exclusive doors of the Faubourg St. Germain thrown open to her; princesses, duchesses, countesses, celebrities of the day and strangers of distinction her friends. She was in close touch with the leading artists of her day--Le Moyne, blunt Quentin de La Tour, and the rest.

The girl, in spite of her astounding industry, was soon wholly unable to carry out the orders for portraits which rained in upon her; her charm of manner and her increasing beauty added to the pressure of the siege of her admirers.

A little while before her fifteenth birthday her mother married again a young jeweller, of the name of Le Sevre, a miserly fellow, who, under the pretext of taking them into the country, hired a little house at Chaillot, where they went with the girl for their Sundays; the thrifty stepfather planting its garden with the gay blossoms of the useful haricot-bean and the nasturtium. He had a frugal mind.

The petty tyrannies of the thrifty jeweller, his mean outlook on life, and his sordid aims, made of the habits and atmosphere of his class an even more uncongenial world for this brilliant girl to live in. Happily the pursuit of her art, and the friendship of that circle into which that art and her gifts and charming personality raised her, mitigated the tyranny of this sordid relationship. And, to add to her relief, Madame Suzanne, wife of the sculptor, and a friend of her mother, would carry off the girl with her into the country; and it was during one of their walks at Marly that she met for the first time Marie Antoinette.

On the 10th of May 1774, a month before Elizabeth Vigee's nineteenth birthday, King Louis the Fifteenth died of the small-pox--died without a friend, for he had dismissed the Du Barry in tears a short while before. His body was hastily thrust into a coffin, and hurried at the trot through the darkness to St. Denis, for fear of attack from the sullen crowds that gathered to do it dishonour; so was he huddled away amongst the bones of the ancient kings of his race, unattended by the Court, and amidst the curses of his people.

Louis the Sixteenth, son of Louis Fifteenth's only son, the dead Dauphin, ascended the throne of France in his twentieth year, a pure-minded, honourable young fellow, full of good intentions, and sincerely anxious for the well-being of his people; but of a diffident temper, timid, hesitating, and uncertain in decision, and under the influence of his young consort, the beautiful Queen Marie Antoinette, who had the imperious temper of her house, wedded to light and frivolous manners; she brought to her counsels a deplorable lack of judgment and a steadfast incompetence in knowledge of men.

The good qualities of this young pair had been very well in private life; but France needed greater abilities for her guidance than the simple virtues. It was a hideous part of the destiny of this young couple that they came to rule over a France that was passionately angered at the misdeeds of a king and his privileged class of nobles and clergy who had gone before them--of a class that had come unscathed through that reign, and were grown incapable of realising that they could not come unscathed through another.

The Du Barry flown, and her precious trio of ministers with her, Louis recalled the crafty old schemer Maurepas to power from the banishment into which the Pompadour had sent him; but he otherwise began well by making Turgot his minister of finance.

On the 25th of October in this 1774 that saw Louis Quinze and Marie Antoinette come to the throne of France, Elizabeth Vigee was elected to the Academy of St. Luke at nineteen years of age.

She brought to her early successes a charming modesty and an utter absence of conceit or of pose that added greatly to her reputation, and paved the way to further honours.