Chapter III: Marriage and Motherhood

But early success was not to be without black care stepping into the triumphal car in her procession towards an early and wide fame of this charming and accomplished young woman of twenty. Honours were easy. But the devil was in the machinery.

Her family had lived in the Rue de Clery, opposite the hotel Lubert; thence they had drifted to the Rue St. Honore hard by the Palais Royal; they now returned to the Rue de Clery to the hotel Lubert itself. Here it chanced that Le Brun, the expert, carried on a lucrative traffic in pictures. His gallery attracted the pretty artist, who could study there at leisure the works of the great masters that passed through.

The two families soon became intimate. Le Brun carefully weighing the great advantages that such a union could bring to him, but entangled by his engagement to marry the daughter of a Dutch dealer in pictures who lived opposite to him, and with whom he had considerable business in works of art, beat about as to how he could marry Elizabeth Vigee. The girl was living in the splendour of a circle to which her family could not hope to aspire; the picture-dealer belonged to the middle-class in which her own family moved. Any day she might marry out of that middle-class world into the world of fashion. He saw that the girl moved in, and was happiest in, a great world to which he had not the key. He had the ambition to belong to that world, though his common-sense might have told him that he never could do more than hang about its outer courts. He was a calculating blackguard, a man of loose life, and a vulgar fellow with vulgar ambitions. He saw astutely enough that this girl was well on the high-road to considerable fortune. The Dutch girl opposite necessitated wary walking. He played the romantic lover, and before six months were run out he was pressing his suit, asking Elizabeth Vigee to marry him secretly.

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PLATE IV.--PORTRAIT OF MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN

(In the National Gallery, London)

She saw at Anvers the famous "Chapeau de paille" by Rubens. 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 Vigee Le Brun set her palette. The thing is thrilling with life; and the little feminine conceit of wearing her black wrap is quaintly delightful.

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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--Vigee 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. Vigee 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. Vigee 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 Vigee 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.

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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 Vigee 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.

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To its earliest, freshest years belongs the first portrait that Vigee 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.

Vigee 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.

Vigee 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 siecle Louis Quinze. 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; 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 Vigee 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.

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. 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 Vigee 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 Vigee 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.