YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY i%PW« AA m ^kB^^ %gbtikjLfj&& f *&3sam &% ij&^-y' - SrSa in *?:< x*My The French Pastellists of the Eighteenth Century MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON ¦ CHICAGO ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. MADAME DE POMPADOUR AS SHEPHERDESS i BY LA TOUR {The Marquise de Ganay's Co//ection) The French Pastellists of the Eighteenth Century Their Lives their Times their Art and their Significance BY HALDANE MACFALL i AUTHOR OF * THE MASTERFOLK,' ' THE WOOINGS OF JEZEBEL PETTYFER,' ' WHISTLER,' * IBSEN,' ' BOUCHER,' ETC. EDITED BY T. LEMAN HARE WITH FIFTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1909 It is the fashion, and a pretty one, to set the name of the writer of a book upon its title-page ; but 1 cannot let these pages go forth wholly under such usurpation — -justice demands that its god-parents should also be acknowledged, and their names, ranks, and titles set forth. In essaying to bring back out of the dead past and weave the romance of their years about the artists who won to the fine achievement of the pastel in the France of Louis Quinze, I have come to the gay business with the enhancing advantage of having the coloured record of their masterpieces to keep my pens ink in handsome and dandified company. But across this splendid acreage through which I have reaped with what little skill has been granted to me, it would have been impossible for me to have wandered without serious trespass, had I not been freed by the generous kindliness of the owners of such rich fields as have had their gates thrown open to me. The freely-given consent of Madame la Marquise de Ganay has been granted with a rare and gracious spirit; Madame Jahan has also smiled upon the venture ; whilst to Monsieur Danjon of Caen i" owe a debt of kindly thought and act. Monsieur Le Prieur, of the great gallery of the Louvre, and the Curators of the Amiens and Orleans Museums have proved that in France the man in office can be as helpful as in many lands he is tedious ; and Monsieur Eck, the Curator of the Saint Quentin Museum, has loosed the hard laws of his charge to the utmost of his power. In England, Mr. Martin Hardie of the South Kensington Museum has my gratitude for all his good comradeship and advice. But it is above all to my friend, T. Leman Hare, that I owe the heaviest debt — for not only has he worked for me and with me, but it is to him that I owe the very inspiration of the delightful undertaking. It was out of Hare's brain that the book was born ; to his sympathy and energy that its upbringing chiefly belongs; and to his enthusiasm that my share in it was wholly due. HALDANE MACFALL. PREFACE Pastels ! The very word raises the rustle of silk and satin and brocade from the dead past — evokes from out the ghostly years, as though to the whispering f utter of scented fans, the stately etiquette of the eighteenth century, with more than a hint of the powder-puff and rouge-pot and patches that were a part of the elaborate battery of the hooped Beauties who, stepping from the sedan-chair, peacocked and strutted it, as though they walked to gavotte and minuet, down the dandified years of the seventeen- hundreds. Indeed, Pastel, if we must write its biography, moved with a cane, bewigged, be-laced, snuff-box in hand, cocked hat under arm, toes well pointed. Of a truth, pastel came to chiefest glory in the days of Louis Quinze. This dainty coloured chalk it was that gave to France her great portrait-painter, the vigorous forthright Maurice Quentin de La Tour — who, ridding it of the mere prettinesses that threatened it, uttered through its exquisite colour-gamut a large and forceful art in an age when blunt truth and frank character- drawing were scarce in the mode, raising it to power undreamed of — he with the coloured chalk, as Chardin with colour, whether in chalk or oils, stating what he saw with downright sincerity and rare gifts. The pastel is as much a part of the seventeen- hundreds as the sedan-chair, as much a part of its mode. 'Tis true that, before ifOO struck, the coloured chalk — the black crayon, enhanced with the white or the red, or so-called sanguine or the like — had been employed by the great dead; by Holbein most wondrous well; in France itself by Doumoustier and by Lagneau, whose stiff and grave folk about the Courts of Henry the Fourth and Louis the Thirteenth, and whose burgess folk and ordinary citizens many of them owe to chalks what httle vii viii THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS shred of immortality remains to them out of the years that are gone ; 'tis true that, in the Grand Monarque's days that followed, Le Brun and Largilliere limned many in chalks who walked the pompous stage whereof Louis the Fourteenth was King Sun — Vivien, too, made the use of chalks his hobby ; whilst engraver Nanteuil drew first in, chalk the great folk of the day whom he engraved. Nay ; did not Watteau open the new century with drawings in coloured chalks of two or three hues that are as keenly prized to-day as Holbein's master-work ? But these had all passed away, and done what was given to their hands' skill to do, and been gathered to their forefathers, before France saw ever a true pastel ; for, even the last of them, the early-doomed Watteau, died the year after the true pastel came into France, living but long enough to approve it, though his melancholy eyes were to know little of it, and his nervous fingers to employ it never. Pastel came into France out of Italy, brought thereto in the satchel ofthe Venetian lady Rosalba Carriera, in if 20 — the scandalous if artistic Duke of Orleans being Regent over the land. And Italian its statement largely threatened to be, uttered with some lisping French accent of prettiness, until from the north came La Tour and brought Flemish frankness and sincerity to the use of it, speaking pure French through its employment, and carrying it to highest achievement. To understand the significance of pastel and of them that wrought with it to such consummate purpose, we must know the significance of France in the age that employed it. Nor is it a dry lesson to be swallowed with a wry face the while ; for it was a strange, a romantic, and an airily- sinning France that the pastel came to interpret, flirting in gay attire past hovels where groaned a sullen other France that was to rise at last in sudden blaze of fierce anger from her scowl of suffering and to rend the pretty broideries and fal-lals from the fantastic folk who oppressed her, and to send them near naked to the scaffold, in batches, like cattle to the slaughter-house — rising, blind-Samson like, and pulling down the pillars of her ancient state about her, delivering from bondage the might of a great people's new-found strength. CONTENTS _ PAGE Foreword ......... vii CHAPTER I Wherein we look upon the Setting of King Sun ... . i CHAPTER II Wherein at the Sun's Setting we hover about the Gateway of Birth, that leads to the Mystery that is called Destiny ...... 7 CHAPTER III Wherein Master Maurice Quentin de La Tour enters into the Sunset . . 15 CHAPTER IV Which sees France dancing to Light Airs, and a Prince of the Blood setting 18 the Tune ......... CHAPTER V Wherein we see the Pastel come into France in a Venetian Lady's Baggage . 23 CHAPTER VI Wherein we see a Fairy Godmother hide the Sceptre of France in a Strange Cradle 27 ix b x THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS CHAPTER VII PAGE Wherein a Lawyer's Son changes his Name ; and discovers that the Printing- Press is the Weapon of Might . . . . • ¦ 31 CHAPTER VIII Which hints of the 111 Luck that is in Thirteen .... 34 CHAPTER IX Wherein the youth Maurice Quentin de La Tour appears again awhile, to disappear again, stealing away from the Law and the Gossips . . . .36 CHAPTER X Wherein a Frenchman goes into England ; and much is in the Journey for All France ......... 40 CHAPTER XI Wherein a Great Soul is seen to shine in a Small Body . . . .43 CHAPTER XII ossession of the Seventeen 46 Wherein we see the Ghost of Watteau walk, and take possession of the Seventeen Hundreds .... CHAPTER XIII Wherein Genius discovers that it must stand alone, and shun the leaning on the Staff of Others .... 5+ CHAPTER XIV Which discovers us largely at the Mercy of the Gossips CHAPTER XV Wherein Gossip leads us behind the Scenes . l r • • . 02 CONTENTS xi CHAPTER XVI TITL * >1 PAGE Wherein we step awhile into more or less Godly Company . . .68 CHAPTER XVII Which has to do with Virtue and Bigotry .... .71 CHAPTER XVIII Wherein Maurice Quentin de La Tour is elected to the Royal Academy of Painters and Sculptors ......... 76 CHAPTER XIX Wherein the New Art is revealed, enthroned in the Ancient Palace of the Kings of France ......... 79 CHAPTER XX Of a Duel wherein a Convent-bred Girl overthrows the Woman of the World, but the Prize of Beauty is snatched by the Youngest Sister . . .84 CHAPTER XXI Wherein a Prince, becoming King, hurriedly changes his Printed Ideas . . 90 CHAPTER XXII Wherein we discover the Narrow Gulf that divides the Dancing-Girl from the Old Maid ......... 92 CHAPTER XXIII Which suggests a Wasp in High Places . . . . , -95 CHAPTER XXIV Wherein a Daughter of the Bourgeoisie stretches out her Pretty Hand to the Sceptre of France ........ 101 xii THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS CHAPTER XXV PAGE Wherein a New Star appears above the Horizon . . . ¦ .109 CHAPTER XXVI Which hints at Scandal of a Thorn in the Bed of Roses . . • • IJ3 CHAPTER XXVII Wherein we see a Frenchman playing the part of Turk . . . .117 CHAPTER XXVIII Wherein we see Jean Jacques seated ridiculously on a Rush-bottomed Chair . 119 CHAPTER XXIX Which tells how a King of Prussia thought to cage a Wild Thing, and suffered Scratch . . . . . . . . .123 CHAPTER XXX Which has to do with the Stooping of the Great Ones . . . .128 CHAPTER XXXI Which contains still another Hint of the Martyrdom of having one's Portrait made by Genius ••...... 12-2 CHAPTER XXXII Wherein we meet Madame la Marquise de Pompadour in Strange Company . 136 CHAPTER XXXIII Wherein the Curtain rings up and discovers a Beautiful Singer . . .143 CONTENTS xiii CHAPTER XXXIV PAGE Wherein the New Thought comes near to Stabbing the King under the Fifth Rib ; and confuses the Fashions ...... 148 CHAPTER XXXV Which has to do with the Passing of the Pompadour . . . .153 CHAPTER XXXVI Wherein we see Old Age stealing the Cunning from Men's Hands . . 157 CHAPTER XXXVII Wherein is much Futile Burning of the New Thought by the Common Hangman 160 CHAPTER XXXVIII In which a Toast is drunk to a New Beauty . . . . .165 CHAPTER XXXIX Which discovers a Hurried Funeral and Madame du Barry a-weeping . .168 CHAPTER XL Wherein we catch Glimpses of the Culmination of a Restless Intranquil Spirit, not unacquainted with Sadness . . . . . . .171 CHAPTER XLI Which discovers a Worthy Banker behind the Throne of France . . . 1 74 CHAPTER XLII Which is haunted by the Chill Sneer of Silence ..... 177 xiv THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS CHAPTER XLIII PAGE Wherein we see the New Thought crowned with the Bays amidst Wild Enthusiasm, and Death reaping thereafter . . ¦ • • I°3 CHAPTER XLIV Wherein a Genius is discovered Dead in an Inn, and is buried in a Pauper's Grave . 188 CHAPTER XLV Wherein we discover Two Women seizing each a Fortieth Part of Immortality . 191 CHAPTER XLVI Wherein Old Age sets Straws in the Hair of Genius .... 193 CHAPTER XLVII Wherein a King cannot find even an Attic to call his own ; and hears a Dead Man's Body hailed by his People in his Stead . . . . .197 CHAPTER XLVIII Which raises the Curtain upon a Storm, a Nightmare, the Terror, and a Mighty Dawn ......... 199 CHAPTER XLIX Which has to do with the Fall of the Blossomed Rose .... 203 CHAPTER L Of the Passing of the Pastel •••.... 206 POSTSCRIPT Which tells of an Officer and a Gentleman 209 LIST OF PLATES Madame de Pompadour as S herdess lep- La Tour . Marquise de Ganay's Coloured Collection Frontispiece Sylvestre .... do. . . At St. Quentin TO FACE PAGE . Black . 8 Chevalier de l'ordre de S. Espn t . do. . . Louvre . Colourec 16 Girl with Monkey Rosalba Carriera do. do. 22 TSte Pench^e La Tour At St. Quentin do. 28 Louis XV do. . Louvre do. 34 Mademoiselle Dangeville do. At St. Quentin . Black 38 Chardin .... do. . Louvre . Colourec 43 Marechal de Saxe do. . do. do. . 46 Madame Favart . do. . At St. Quentin do. . 52 Voltaire .... do. . M. Emile Strauss' Col- Black . 58 lection Madame de la Popeliniere . Mademoiselle Puvigny do. . do. . At St. Quentin do. . . do. . Coloured 6264 L'Abbe Hubert . do. . do. . . Black . 68 L'Abbe Pommyer Marie Leczinska . do. . do. . do. . Louvre . do. . Coloured 70 72 M. Pajou .... do. . do. do. . 76 The Dauphin Comtesse D'Orsay do. . . Boze do. do. do. . do. . 79 85 Portrait of a Girl . Artist unknown do. do. . 88 La Camargo Portrait of Boucher La Tour . Lundberg At St. Quentin Louvre do. . do. . 9295 Study of a Head . Boucher do. do. . 96 Madame Chardin Chardin do. . Black . 1 00 Portrait of a Girl Perronneau . Private Collectii an . Coloured 109 Young Girl with Cat . do. Louvre do. . 112 Maurice Quentin de La Tour . La Tour At Amiens Mus 5um . do. n5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau . do. . At St. Quentin do. . 119 D'Alembert .... do. . M. Danjon's C tion ollec- do. . 121 Manelli .... do. . At St. Quentin . . Black . 122 XV XVI THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS TO FACE PAGE Crdbillon . Madame Masse . Madame Chevotet Pierre Bouquier . La Pompadour Pere Emmanuel . Mademoiselle Fel Marie Josephe de Saxe Dauphin de France Portrait of a Lady Madame Valade . Laurent Cars Marquis d'Argenson Jean Restout La Dame en Rose ChardinMarquise de Crussolls Madame Victoire Head of a Girl Due d'AngoulSme Portrait of a Lady Portrait of a Lady La Tour do. . Perronneau do. . La Tour do. . do. . do. . do. . Perronneau do. . do. . La Tour do. . Drouais . Chardin Vig£e le Brun Labille Guiard Artist unknown Boze La Tour do. At St. Quentin . do. . At Orleans Museum Louvre do. At St. Quentin . do. . Louvre do. At Orleans Museum do. LouvreAt St. Quentin . do. . Marquise de Ganay's Collection LouvrePrivate Collection Louvre At Amiens Museum . Louvre Marquise de Ganay's Collection At Orleans Museum . Black . Coloured do. do. do. Black Coloured do.do. do. do.do. Black do. Coloured do. do. do. do. do. do. do. 124 128 133 134140H3 146 •S3 154160165170•74 178183186 190192199 203206 208 Colour Plates by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London. CHAPTER I WHEREIN WE LOOK UPON THE SETTING OF KING SUN When the first hour of 1700 struck upon the drowsy ear of France, the sun pf the Grand Monarque was about to set. Louis the Fourteenth, nicknamed " Great," was nearing the end of his long lease of sovereignty. " King Sun " indeed was soon to be sinking in disasters blood-red ; yet with flashes of golden glory about him, spite of the monstrous black shadow of bankruptcy that the splendours of his long reign had cast over the land ; for, Louis the Fourteenth stood head and shoulders in his might above all other princes of Europe, in their opinion, still. That a mightier spirit, one of the mightiest of the ages, of more lofty aims and greater essence, had lived and achieved much, and failed in achieving much, and died in his day, neither he, nor the England that bred him, wholly realised, even whilst they feared him — yet Oliver Cromwell it was who laid the axe to all that Louis and Louis' France, nay Louis' Europe, held in esteem. Oliver Cromwell it was whose large genius destroyed the world that Louis builded, trampling it under foot with great clumsy soldier-boots, and giving at his sword's point to the wide world the inspiration of liberty that was to create the Revolt of the English in the American colonies, and grant its birthright and its strength thereby to France herself at last. The seed of Freedom that grim Cromwell sowed, in blundering fashion enough, to be sure, is blossoming broadcast to-day, and wise and stern- eyed men bask upon its mighty acreage ; whilst strong-souled peoples, with shrug of contempt or rough laughter, toss about King Louis' 2 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. conceited jape, grandiloquent if abysmal in its tom-folly : " L'etat c'est Moi!" 'Twas not so guffawed upon then — Europe believed in her Grand Monarque, and echoed his jape with awe-filled mouth. And it was to cost the lords of France the guillotine and a king's head in the basket before it was silenced. Louis the Fourteenth's beautiful and wilful mistress, the proud Montespan, had given place to the governess of her children, the Maintenon — daughter of the Protestant historian d'Aubigne by some whim of fate, and widow 01 the comic poet Scarron by an even more comic irony — she who governed Louis since she was forty until his death, as she had governed the Montespan's children before him. 'Twas her bigoted sway that had led him to the supreme folly of the Revoca tion of the Edict of Nantes, which sent some of the best blood and hardiest manhood and most skilful brains of France into exile, nay worse, into the ranks of his enemies ; as he had learnt to his cost when stout Schomberg, aforetime one ofhis greatest generals, then his deadly foe, plunging his horse into the flood of the Boyne in the van of Orange William's host, had pointed his conquering sword at Louis' troops with his famed cry, " Forward, gentlemen — there are your persecutors ! " as he fell on that day that saw the Frenchmen and their Irish allies overwhelmed by the little Dutchman and his English and Huguenot troopers. Louis' statecraft — so he accounted his treacheries — was coming home to roost. Others found cheating at cards just as easy a way to winning tricks as he. Then the King's old ears heard of the English troopers riding down the flower of his splendid soldiery at Blenheim on that terrible 13th of August in 1704, in the same month that Rooke took Gibraltar from him in the South ; his sixty- eighth year brought him the dread news of Ramillies, and Flanders fell from his Divine Right. Bankruptcy stared the nation in the tace ; and King Sun's seventieth year brought to him the fearful news of Oudenarde, then of Lille and Ghent and Bruges, and of the frontiers of France herself threatened. The terrible winter that followed saw gaunt famine throughout the land ; but even eight years of taxation i SETTING OF KING SUN 3 forestalled, and the King and his nobility sending their plate to the Mint only brought the crowning disaster of the defeat of Villars at Malplaquet. The glory of King Sun seemed at an end when some of his old luck returned to him — Marlborough fell to the bitter enmity and suspicions of his rivals in England. A few glints of success followed the French arms. Then, at last, promise of peace ! But with the promise of peace beyond his frontiers, Death came stalking across the threshold of the King's palace. First the Dauphin was taken. Then the Dauphin's son [the Duke of Burgundy, the pride of the nation who had become Dauphin in his stead] lost his young Dauphiness, Adelaide of Savoy, idol of the old King and of his Court ; and, before the week was out, the young Dauphin himself followed the dead girl to the grave. Their eldest child, the Duke of Brittany, wore his rank of Dauphin but a few days, going to his long sleep within a month of his parents — his sickly little infant brother, Louis, Duke of Anjou, becoming heir to the throne as Dauphin, soon to become King as Louis the Fifteenth. Peace came — the Peace of Utrecht — to the old King in a home made desolate ; with his France glad to be allowed her bare in dependence, the splendours and the bombastic illusions of King Sun's earlier years wholly departed from him — the nation in a state of bankruptcy, the labourers of the field perishing by famine and sickness, bitter religious strife between Jesuit and Jansenist every where, the legitimate line of his house so threatened that he legitimised and put into the line of succession the sons of his mistress the Montespan as the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse. But if the woman who stood behind his throne felt this triumph of the dead woman whom she had usurped, she held dominion still over the old King's conscience. For — if Louis were flinging France's splendid genius for War to the humilities, even whilst he strutted it as War God — his buffet to the splendid genius of France in Thought, nudged to it by the narrow-minded piety of the woman who held his 4 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. will, was more serious still. Louis was to strike a blow that was to rend the nation in twain ; he was to create modern France by essaying to slay it. The mystic doctrines of grace, predestination, and free will that racked the age across wide Europe, and found their mouthpiece in France through Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, had created a following of stern men in the North ; the monastery of Port Royal became the centre of the movement, the famous monastery that brought forth Arnauld, Pascal, de Sacy, Nicole, and Lancelot. The Jesuits, predominant in the Church of France, bitterly assailing the Jansenists, and receiving the support of Rome and of the Court, were in full career against the heretics, and had riven the nation with internal war, when Pascal, with scalding sarcasm, published his crushing indictment against them. The Court, however, stood to the Jesuits — which is to say, that at once the Jansenists became a power in the State ; all such as were disaffected towards the Court went over to their camp. Jansenism thus became a part of the cause of the people. The beautiful Duchess of Longueville, heroine of the Fronde, was its passionate partisan. Rome committed the impolicy of pressing the King to blot out the heretical Jansenists ; grew daring and, setting aside the King's authority over his Church, put her orders upon the French clergy to refuse consolation to the dying Jansenists — and, in the doing, went a step too far even for Louis' piety. The eloquence of Bossuet thundered against Rome's interference with things temporal ; and Louis, roused by the insolence against him as head of the State, fell foul of the Popes — the Jansenists became more powerful. Then came, like bolt from the blue, a book flung into France — the Reflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament, written by an Oratorian priest Quesnel. Rome again flung all her strength against the heresies ; and the Jesuit confessor to the King, Le Tellier, with the Maintenon as his too willing tool, sapped the will ofthe old King. Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, bluntly defied his Pope. But Louis struck at the heresies and made peace with Rome. So it came that 1709 saw the convent of Port Royal des Champs razed to the ground, the nuns forced from i SETTING OF KING SUN 5 their cloisters with cruel rigour and scattered throughout the land, the church profaned, the sacred relics torn from the altars, the dead dug from their graves, and the soil given over to the plough. Jansenism thenceforth wore the robe of martyrdom, and stood arrayed as for its bridal. The land was rent from end to end. The Jesuits played their master-stroke ; they persuaded Rome, in the September of 171 3, to issue the famous bull " Unigenitus " that excommunicated and forbade the last offices of the Church to the dying Jansenist — that bull unwittingly created the passionate desire for liberty which, eighty years afterwards, was to raise the guillotine before the King's palace and strike the life from the royal house of France. Two years afterwards, in this very month of September, bitterly persecuting his people, the old King saw Death beckon him. In such darkness King Sun lay him down and resigned himself to die, with fortitude and that devout piety that had never failed him even in his supremest treacheries. It was a part of the heroic pose of his age, and he kept the pose to the last. His curse, that Madame de Maintenon, who had brought his grandeur and his state toppling about his ears, had withdrawn herself under plea of fatigue to St. Cyr, when the lonely old King — his physicians, his priests, and his lackeys of the Court his only attendants in their official necessity — sent for his five- year-old great-grandson ; and the small Dauphin being brought to his bedside, the dying man uttered an admirable tract to the sickly little fellow, exhorting the child to remember his responsibility to his Maker ! to cultivate peace with his neighbours ! to shun extravagance ! and to lay to heart the well-being of his people ! whilst the bewildered child blinked and wondered what the large words meant. So died King Sun in the grand manner in which he had lived and breathed, in his seventy-seventh year, on the morning of the ist of September 171 5. His untiring industry — he worked in the Cabinet at affairs of State for eight hours a day till his death ; his dogged will ; his sound sense, if unbrilliant intellect ; his sagacity and grip of intrigue ; his unscrupulous mind ; his insane estimate of kingship ; his inflated sense 6 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. i of his own importance and greatness, lay stilled in death at last. As the breath left his royal body, the herald of the Court crept to the window of the dead King's sickly great-grandson with a black plume in his hat, whispering low, " The King is dead ! " — reappeared immediately after wards, white plume in hat, and cried aloud, " Long live the King ! " For the five-year-old child was King of France ; and sat upon the throne of a great people as Louis the Fifteenth. CHAPTER II WHEREIN AT THE SUN's SETTING WE HOVER ABOUT THE GATEWAY OF BIRTH, THAT LEADS TO THE MYSTERY THAT IS CALLED DESTINY Into gloom sank King Sun ; and the curtain that rang down upon his adventures' ending blotted out also the drama of his age. The age of the Grand Monarque had been a wondrous affair, not without its real splendours as well as its pomposities. The old King, dying, could look back upon his reign with pride, the years that had brought forth Mazarin and Turenne and Colbert and the great Conde and Villars ; Corneille, Moliere, Racine and Boileau had given the age its drama ; Poussin and Claude Lorraine had dignified its passage with their landscapes ; Le Sueur, Le Brun, Mignard, Largilliere, and Rigaud had limned its stately ideals or painted its stately portraits ; Pascal, Malebranche, La Bruyere and Rochefoucauld had written its wit and wisdom ; Bossuet, Fenelon, Bourdaloue, Massillon and Flechier had voiced its spiritual yearnings ; Puget had carved its ideals in marble ; Lulli had made its music ; Mansart and Perrault had built its mansions. It had been the Age of the Grand Manner. The man of affairs thought in mock-heroics, and stiffened his day with solemn pomposity, and sinned his sins and committed his crimes as though the world were his cathedral. France arrayed herself in a formal and conse quential robe of splendid pretence, donned the cloak of the gods, breathed the heavy atmosphere of an elaborate and formal etiquette, and walked her day with a godlike strut. Her language took on a stilted magnificence, her phrases were stiff as with broideries. The making of war became her aim in life — conquests her ideal of glory. 7 8 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. And her splendid courage and romantic imagination made her an easy prey to the itch for the mock-heroic idols that she set upon the altars of her faith. Yet King Sun's dying eyes beheld also a France behind and beyond the perruques of his courtiers — a France exhausted by her glory, bored by her pomp, her treasuries empty ; saw that the heritage he was about to deliver over to the child who stood at the foot of the throne held a great glamour of renown and splendour of State to be maintained, with small resource wherewith to maintain it. But, what he did not see, was that even amidst the pomposities the sincerities were being born. Once, indeed, during these consequential years, France had come near to finding herself. The rising of the Fronde [frondeur, slinger of stones) had attracted the greatest in the land to the cause of the people. Turenne had drawn the sword for fatherland, as had the Dukes of Longueville, of Rochefoucauld, of Beaufort, of Elbceuf, and of Bouillon ; nay, the great Conde himself, had he not carried Paris itself for the people ? The beautiful women of the old noblesse also — the Duchesses of Longueville and of Bouillon, and the spirited wife of Conde, Clemence de Maille and the resolute Mademoiselle de Montpensier. The house of Orleans, ofthe blood royal, had begun the tradition of its adhesion to this same popular cause. The lessons being taught by the Round heads across the Channel, their mighty successes and their mad failures, were not lost upon these skilful brains. The craft of Mazarin and the Queen-mother, when all had seemed lost to the Crown, had thwarted overthrow by splendid seeming surrenders, and had thereby, oddly enough, won the land to absolute despotism. The nobles, supported by the magistracy and the burgess folk, were foiled in controlling the despotism of the Crown ; and for sixty years, until his death, Louis Quatorze had ruled with utter contempt of all constitutional govern ment. But even as he built the pretentious fabric of his castle on the sands, preening himself upon his greatness, he was laying, all unwitting of it, the foundations upon which a really great France was to rise, and to rid the land of him and his tribe for ever. LOUIS DE SYLVESTRE By De La Tour at St. Quentin ii THE GATEWAY OF BIRTH 9 For, France never forgot how near she had come to the Realities. Out of the Fronde were born ambitions, hopes, visions that were to bring forth wits and armed men — and at the end of all, for the great uprooting, the guillotine — in the years to come. Out of the Fronde were born virile souls to France, who were to destroy the tyrannies of her popinjay lords and pompous governors. With wit and subtle pen and reason and bitter gall of ink, with satire and irony and contempt, with enthusiasms and mighty dreams, they were to imbue the down-trodden people with self-confidence and belief in the splendour of their destiny. The torch that roused to new awakening was to be no too-sudden conflagration, such as had wasted the people's might during the Fronde and brought it to naught, but a slow and steady illumination across the length and breadth of the land. And you shall find it, not only in her politics, but in her arts and literature, slowly catching flame, and shedding a beacon-light to her groaning millions. Kings and princes might be born in the purple, or die, amidst the ringing or tolling of bells and thunder of cannon in Paris ; but there were being born, without public rejoicings or the making of holidays, men who were to fling the mightiest from their seats. On the eve of these seventeen hundreds, on the 21st of the November of that year of 1693 that saw the Oratorian priest Quesnel utter his Reflexions to the world, reflections that set France aflame, there was born, to a notary in Paris, a sickly child, Francois Marie Arouet, who was to change the face of France, overthrow her royal line, upheave her from throne to gutter — for the child grew and changed his name, twenty-five years afterwards, to Voltaire. The boy Arouet's only surviving brother Armand was ten years older, and his only sister Marguerite nine years older than he. He came of a middle-class family of Poitou, whence his grandfather had gone to Paris and become a well-to-do clothier. Francois, father to Voltaire, became a notary with a very high clientele, being family solicitor to the great families of the Sullis, Saint - Simons, Praslins, and other noblesse. His wife, Marguerite d'Aumard, was of good family. Just io THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. before the future Voltaire's birth, the notary became Receiver of Fees, and a personage in the service of the Crown, with an official residence in Paris and a country-house at Chatenay. A friend of the family was the famous Ninon de I'Enclos — about whom revolved the aristocratic and free-thinking set opposed to the Court, of whom was the brilliant Abbe de Chateauneuf, Voltaire's godfather. The boy showed ability even as a child ; and was precociously clever. The abbe taught the lad to scoff at religion. The boy's mother died when he was seven, and his tenth year saw him sent to the great Jesuit College of Louis-le-Grand as a boarder; here he made many aristocratic friends, including the two d'Argensons. He early showed his literary gifts — " On leaving my cradle I lisped in verse." His verse caught the fancy of the aged Ninon de I'Enclos, and she left him a legacy of 2000 francs wherewith to buy books. He wrote, before his seven years of schooling were done, at the age of fourteen, his spirited Ode to Saint Genevieve ; in this year of 1708 France was defeated in battle after battle by Marlborough, the road to Paris seemed open to the allies, and it left a painful impression on the lad. Two years afterwards, at sixteen, he was writing letters from school showing contempt for the dreary religious practices of the " retreat " — he left the college at seventeen a decided sceptic. His father intended the youth for the bar ; but Voltaire grew weary of the study of the law, and spent his time at the " Society of the Temple" with Pleasure for goddess — a club of Epicurean wits, poets, and aristocrats to which his godfather had introduced him. Here the bright, witty, and agreeable young fellow, ot distinguished manners, set himself to win the friendship of men destined for high stations in life. His father, angry at the youth's neglect of the law and his laxity of life, packed him off to Caen, where his quips against morality and religion soon got him into hot water. His father, at his wits' end what to do with his son, then sent him in the suite of the Ambassador to the Hague (171 3), where he promptly fell in love with Mademoiselle Dunoyer, daughter of a scandalous Frenchwoman, ii THE GATEWAY OF BIRTH n with a gift for literary lampooning. She set herself against the young Arouet's intrigue with her daughter ; but the girl was caught in the young fellow's rooms dressed as a young man, and there was a scene. The Ambassador packed him off to Paris again in three months. His hot-tempered father, after the first outburst of anger, sent the youth to live with the attorney Alain to be trained in the law ; but a few months afterwards he allowed the young fellow to leave this drudgery, and put him on an allowance. We next see him competing for a prize offered by the Academy for the best poem written on the new choir at Notre Dame. He lost it — writing in revenge a satire on the mediocre abbe who won it. This stinging satire, " Le Bourbier," at one bound put him into the public notice. It was a success that was to cost this clever youth of twenty very dear. . . . On the 28th of November in the last year of the sixteen hundreds (1699), was b°rn in the Rue de Seine in Paris a man-child, Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, who was to give France's high achievement in art a new note — the note of reality, of simple truth, the beauty of the homely thing. He was the second son of Jean Chardin, a carpenter — as the Court phrase had it, " carpenter to the pocket- money of the King." His mother was one Francoise David. The carpenter to the King's pocket - money had five children : Noel Sebastien Chardin ; Simeon, our artist ; Juste, who became, like his father, carpenter to the King ; Marie Claude ; and Marie Agnes, a worker in linen. This father of Chardin was syndic of his corpora tion, a man of standing amongst carpenters. He made billiard-tables, of which he was indeed the maker to Versailles ; and he destined his sons to the same calling. The second son Simeon, however, showed early signs of his artistic bent. But his father, in horror of the lad's taking up so precarious a means of livelihood, insisted on the youngster going into his workshops. Chardin always regretted these early years lost to the culture of his mind. At last the carpenter to the King's pocket-money gave in ; and sent the youth into the studio of Cazes, a mediocre painter of the Academy, a man of 12 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. conventional mind and achievement in the historical and mythological style created by Le Brun, whose method of training his pupils by giving them his own works to copy taught the young fellow little, and fretted him to restlessness under the tedious instruction without models. In the evenings, however, he was attending the drawing school at the Academy. Simeon Chardin was saved by veriest chance. A young artist, Noel Nicolas Coypel, to whose studio he next went, to assist him, set him a gun to paint into one of his pictures ; Chardin was surprised to see the trouble that Coypel took to polish the barrel ; thenceforth the young fellow paid his whole attention to his models. At Coypel's he had the good fortune to be chosen, with other pupils of the Academy, by Jean Baptiste van Loo to assist van Loo in restoring one of the pictures in the great gallery at Fontainebleau. This is said to have been Chardin's only journey outside Paris. The young fellow came out of the business with increasing reputation ; and was forthwith commissioned to paint a swinging sign for a surgeon ; whereon he painted a scene, After the Duel, which brought him considerable notoriety, even Academicians adding to the crowd in the street before the bewildered surgeon's door to gaze at it. This sign-painter was destined to purify the whole art of France. Such strange beginnings has greatness. He was an honest, kindly, homely, and honourable soul, whose sincerity illuminates all his art, this Chardin. He was soon giving himself up to the painting of still-life and of dead animals. With such skill he wrought these simple things, bringing such truth and dignity of sincerity to his craftsmanship, that his old master Cazes, seeing several of his works, took them for the originals by the great Dutch masters ; the highest tribute surely that the academic mind can pay ! . . . On the 22nd of December 1702, in far Geneva — indeed this same town of Geneva, within a stone's throw of the north-east corner of France, is to play a large part in Louis the Fifteenth's fantastic years — there came into the world twin sons to a small tradesman one Antoine Liotard, a French refugee from religious persecutions n THE GATEWAY OF BIRTH 13 at Montelimar. The twins were destined for a commercial up bringing and career ; but Jean Etienne Liotard showed such marked artistic ability almost from childhood that he was allowed to follow his bent, and the twin brother was soon following in his foot steps. Jean Etienne Liotard was a vigorous- bodied and handsome boy, and grew up a handsome man. His first master, Professor Gardelle, the lad early surpassed ; and was soon working upon his own account, painting miniatures, one of which, coming under the eye of Petitot, so struck that artist that he took the young fellow into his own studio, and taught him painting and enamelling. . . . The third year of the new century, the 29th of September 1703, brought into a cradle, in a modest home in Paris, an infant whose gaiety and charm were to reflect the charm of the courtly conceits and pleasant ways through which the France of the new generation of Louis the Fifteenth was to tread, all careless of her destiny ; and him they christened Francois Boucher. As the father, honest Nicolas Boucher, signed the baptismal certificate, and wrote himself down a " master-painter," and the mother's name as Elizabeth Lemesle, giving their habitation as their very modest home in the Rue de la Verrerie, it is certain that they little foresaw for the child Francois Boucher in his small beginnings the splendour that was to glitter about his name ; as yet was no hint of that proud nickname that was to rechristen him without rite of church, the " Glory of Paris." Yet godfather Francois Prevost, signing as witness to the testa ment of birth, explained himself as "tipstaff to the palace of the King " ; and steeper steps than such have led by back ways to the favour of the lords of the earth. As the little party went home from the official christening to the modest home in the Rue de la Verrerie, honest Nicolas the father, leaving for the day his designing of embroideries and covers for chairs and the like artistries to his prentices, and giving an arm of courtesy to godmother Boullenois, whose father, a fussy little law- officer about the police-court, was in attendance, they, with the 14 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. ii worthy tipstaff, and followed by the little group of friends, chatted and jested about the Saturday child ; the old ladies vowing that the little rogue must become a clever scamp. Arrived in the Rue de la Verrerie, a glass of wine was drunk to the little morsel ; and amidst exchange of snuff and tapping of snuff-boxes, the tipstaff to the palace of the King would not let the occasion pass without confidential gossip of the Court — for these were stirring days, and had he not Exclusive Information ? Indeed, were they not muttering, with bated breath, in the streets of Paris that his luck had deserted the old King ? The cannon of the allies under English Marlborough were thundering a threat to France. The tipstaff to the palace of the King pursed his lips and shook his head, we may be sure. Yes ; the little fellow, Francois Boucher, was born in altered times indeed. CHAPTER III WHEREIN MASTER MAURICE QUENTIN DE LA TOUR ENTERS INTO THE SUNSET Francois Boucher was but a year old ; the little sickly boy Francois Marie Arouet, son of the notary, but eleven ; the child Chardin but five, when, on the 5th day of the September of 1704 — that year that brought the ugly news of the disaster of Blenheim to the ears of the old King of France — there was born to one Francois de La Tour, chanter of the royal chapter of its collegiate church in the northern town of St. Quentin, a little fellow whom they christened Maurice Quentin de La Tour. It was the singer's third son. The child's future promised to be but a modest career ; for the worthy singer's station in life scarce enabled him to promise the boy much more than a most narrow wayfaring, far from the bewigged and aristocratic France of his day. The singer, once trumpeter of cavalry in the Duke of Maine's regiment of carabineers, had drifted back to his native St. Quentin, drawn most likely by the chance of turning what music was in him to account ; but, poor as was his calling, of some choir-like kind within the church, about the steps of which he had played as a child, the man had the chance to give his lads a decent education ; and did so — as we guess by the fact that he was later able to put his eldest boy into finance, another son into that army in which he had himself been but trumpeter, and his third son Maurice into an artistic calling. The once-trumpeter, Francois de La Tour, had married one Reine-Francoise Havard, by whom he had five sons and a daughter. The three eldest sons alone reached to manhood. Their mother 15 1 6 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. dying in 1723, in the painter's nineteenth year, the trumpeter-father married Marie Francoise Deliege, who became the mother of two sons, Honore Adrien (Adrien Francois) de La Tour (1729- 1760), and Jean Francois de La Tour, the future legatee and executor and heir of his artist step-brother. The artist's step-mother was left a widow in 173 1, in the painter's twenty-seventh year. However, our small Maurice does not seem to have glittered amongst the latinities at the college in which they essayed, but failed, to put the wisdom of the ancients into his wilful skull ; and was early using his pencil to his own ends. The once-trumpeter had the sense — perhaps his own taste in the art of music made him sensible to the art that jigged in the boy's blood — not to thwart the lad's tendencies, for he early put him under a drawing-master of the town. Of the childhood and boyhood of Maurice, like that of most boys, little is known. St. Quentin was near the northern borders of France ; and the child no doubt knew of the black threat that hung over the frontiers almost within sound of the cannon's roar that, in these later days of the old King, sounded ominously for the nation's weal. Marlborough and the allies were thundering almost at the northern gates of France ; and the boy knew their dread names ; his childish ears heard of the disasters of Oudenarde and Malplaquet — that terrible day of Malplaquet when stout Villars was wounded, but the chivalrous old war-dog Boufflers (he who, though senior to Villars, had volunteered to serve under him) conducted the defeated French men in such master fashion to Valenciennes, with heavier loss to his enemies than to his own people — that repulse of which the wounded Villars reported to his King that " another such defeat would deliver him from all danger from his enemies . . . ." Of the youth of Maurice Quentin de La Tour there is scant legend. Gossip has it that he ran away from home one fine day at fifteen, and, going to Paris, appeared before the engraver Tardieu whose address he had found at the foot of a print, and who had replied to his appeal to him, thinking him desirous to become an apprentice • but the youngster wished to be a painter, and Tardieu good-naturedly II CHEVALIER DE L'ORDRE DE SAINT-ESPRIT BY LA TOUR {Louvre) iii MASTER MAURICE ENTERS THE SUNSET 17 took him to Delaunay's picture-shop on the Quay de Gesvres, then to Vernansal, who would have nothing to do with him ; but he had better luck with the painter of still-life, Spoede, a member of the Academy of St. Luke. From Spoede the young fellow is said to have learnt to use the pencil and the brush. Our eager student is next heard of at Reims, where he is believed to have gone to take part in the coronation of the twelve-year-old boy-king Louis the Fifteenth (October 25, 1722) ; whence Maurice de La Tour returned to his home at St. Quentin a stripling of eighteen years. But of the youth of Maurice, save that his pencil was busy, there is otherwise little hint and scant and conflicting gossip, until at nineteen a police-court scandal rakes his name out of the haze of forgotten things for a moment. In the lad's eighth year (171 2), the bright-eyed youth Arouet being then a slender youth of nineteen, there was born to a watch maker in Geneva his second son, who was to become famous across the face of the wide world as Jean Jacques Rousseau. D CHAPTER IV WHICH SEES FRANCE DANCING TO LIGHT AIRS, AND A PRINCE OF THE BLOOD SETTING THE TUNE What a strange significance was in the herald's saying on that September morning of 171 5 ! The King is dead indeed; and the wide France that he governed is dead with him. Long live the King ! and he was to live long. A new King, and lord of a new France — as strange, as whimsical, as fantastic a France as the France just dead, but in such different fashion. Arouet, the notary's son, was twenty-two ; Chardin, sixteen ; Boucher, twelve ; La Tour, eleven ; little Jean Jacques Rousseau in Geneva but three years old, on that day that the news was blown across the world that the old King Louis Quatorze of France was dead, and a lad of five sat on the throne of his forefathers as Louis the Fifteenth ; and hot-foot upon the news came other news, that the boy- king's brilliant but dissolute kinsman, Philip, Duke of Orleans, nephew to King Sun and married to King Sun's illegitimate daughter, tearing up the old King's will, as the dying man had foreseen, had seized power as Regent, and had appointed the infamous Abbe Dubois, the Regent's favourite and boon-companion in his debaucheries, to be Minister of France. Across the land, from high and low, came a mighty sigh of relief; light airs fanned the face of the people ; the poetasters burst into trifling song ; the starch melted out of the stiff and demigoddish pose, and the mock-heroics fell from the majesty of the great. All France wearied to scant tolerance of the pompous make-believe and conse quential strut of the sixteen-hundreds, flung off the bullioned raiment 18 ch. iv FRANCE DANCING TO LIGHT AIRS 19 of her heavily-brocaded magnificence from her, and essayed laughter and wit and airy epigram and frivolous jollity — though these, from loss of habit to be blithe, came back at first not wholly rid of the elaborate fripperies of the grand manner. The scandalous Regent and his more scandalous boon-companion, Abbe Dubois, led the dance towards merriment, and shook a trim leg with what quaint dignity lay in the dance and riot, careless that their womenkind skipped to the tune they set to the Court, reckless of the modesties, and scarce hesitant or even demure in the display of more than pretty ankles. The frolicsome gaiety of the people, thus suddenly beckoned back, like the heir to a pedantic parent come into his patrimony, leaped the barriers of innocent delights ; and the courtier and man of fashion, flinging aside the pomposities into the wardrobe with their discarded modes, tricked themselves out in a dandified affectation of light- heartedness, with trivial splendours for their petty aim. The nice conduct of the clouded cane, the calculated strut, the etiquette of the jewelled snuff-box, the elaborate bow and bob and curtsey, took on a mincing graciousness and an affable charm where aforetime they had been ordered to the measure of a slower, more sedate, and more intolerant magnificence. The sedan-chair was carved to more genial lines ; the furnishments of the house were wrought to less rigid design. The subjects for the pictured arts in the adornment of the less solemn boudoir, that forthwith took the place of the pretentious ante-room and lordly hall of the great of King Sun's rigid day, made for the worship of the graces and of the winsome goddesses unhampered with excess of draperies. The gods, with a fluttering ribbon about them, were not wholly banished, but joined the romp in pictorial playfulness. The poets dipped their pens in rose-coloured inks, and got their feet tripping through wide margins to a livelier music. The pursuit of war gave place to the pursuit of gallantry. To be dignified with grace became the education of the school of manners, where aforetime 'twas taught to be dignified with pomp and circumstance. France applauded now the Pretty Fellow. 20 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. But deep down, amongst the millions, scowling discontent found no cause for jocundity ; for the groaning people there was no redress, no relief from the burden of the State. Hungry peasants knew little difference whether the Court slayed or played. Deep-seeing men fretted at the follies, as before they had done at the pomposities. For them was no change but from black to black. A proud people but shifted its load of humiliation from one shoulder to the other — that was all — and found fantastic folly as heavy to bear as godlike pretence. Kingship might sing light-heartedly over the business ; but kingship was spinning the hempen cord only a little longer for its neck. It only needed some daring fellow to discover that the iron lamps at the corners of the streets were useful pulleys over which to haul the rope whereon a courtier dangled. A la lanterne ! was one day to be the rough-throated cry to guide reckless hands to the doing ; but that was not as yet. The Regent Orleans was a man of brilliant abilities, high ambition, great personal courage, amiable habits and generous temper ; his aims were large and his sympathies broad. But he was without scruple or moral foundation — his life shamelessly loose. Yet he began well. The Jesuit confessor Le Tellier was sent packing ; and the learned and noble-minded Abbe Fleury was made keeper of the young King's conscience in his stead. Orleans flung open the doors of the Bastille to swarms of prisoners who had never even known their cause of offence. All lettres de cachet were strictly examined. He encouraged the arts and crafts towards the more graceful and less ornate style that bears his name, shaping as he did the tendencies of the reign of Louis Quinze. He faced the national bankruptcy with a will — the army, chief source of waste, was reduced — but, in seeking to check the corruption in public finance, he relapsed from his liberal aims and fell to the weapon of the weak, Tyranny ; so that France soon knew worse terrors than before he came, from his villainous chambre ardente, that bled the nation by torture and death to yield the monies for his farmers of taxes and the debaucheries of his precious gang of courtiers iv FRANCE DANCING TO LIGHT AIRS 21 — for torture and the spy were abroad in the land to bear witness in this the Regent's vile court of justice. He changed the foreign policy — he became the ally of the ancient enemies of France. The Abbe Dubois, base, false to every principle of honour and decency, abandoned to the grossest vices, held supreme influence over his pupil the Regent — his shrewd insight into the base motives of men, his wit and dogged energy, appealed to the Prince — he corrupted Orleans ; Dubois, in his turn, was now corrupted by English gold. France fell foul of her natural ally Spain, and embarked upon a war that, whilst it brought distinction to the French commander, the Duke of Berwick, also helped Britain to destroy the might of Spain at sea, but could bring, and did bring, little but vast debts to the empty treasury of France. As if out of the blue, suddenly there came to France, with her commerce at a standstill, and faced with utter bankruptcy, a strange reprieve. To the Scotchman John Law, gambler, a fugitive from his own country under the ugly suspicion of foul play in a duel, and living by his wits and the skill of deft fingers at the gaming-tables, Orleans lent his ear, and heard the ingenious scheme that invented the bank note — that banknote that to this day is of such wide usefulness in finance, yet so vilely born in the wild-cat ruffianly half-truth that, the value of gold and silver being transferred to paper-money, paper could be made to create wealth to any extent. So it came that in the December of 171 8 was set up the Royal Bank of France, linked with the gigantic mercantile speculation of the Mississippi or West India Company, which fired the public imagination with dreams of vast riches to be gained without labour, and sent all France madly to the wild gamble — a gamble that England also knew in its South Sea Bubble — whereby, from Princes of the Blood, marshals, generals, high dignitaries of the Church, to tradesmen, waiting-maids and footmen, the race for wealth became a fever. It was in the frenzied height of this gambling fever that, in 1 7 1 8, a young fellow of twenty-five changed his name of Arouet to that of 22 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. iv Voltaire ; and mighty significances are in that name — mightier far than in patents of nobility and the like from the Fountain of Honour of France, where oft-times scant enough honour was. Even the gambler Law became alarmed at the immensity of the madness that obsessed France. Signs began to show that panic might set in. Suddenly, at the end of 171 9, the Prince Conti demanded three cart-loads of silver from the bank in exchange for his banknotes ; and the crash came that sent ruin hurtling throughout the land. Paris awoke to hear of the flight of Law — his " escape with difficulty " from the fury of the mob, to die in Venice a beggar. France was a vast financial chaos ; yet Dubois, in the centre of the whirlwind, all- powerful, hedged himself about with outer strength, and became a cardinal in return for his support of Rome in forcing the bull " Unigenitus " upon the Parliament, and thereby making it State-law as well as Church-law — Orleans, steeped in his vices, giving way to him, if sulkily enough, and deserting the Jansenists. But the reign of Orleans and his infamous abbe was nearly run, when there rattled into the cobbled streets of Paris a diligence from which, with their travel- stained baggage, alighted four ladies, all of them Italian, and one of them old and clearly the mother of the other three, together with a gentleman, who also spoke French with a strong Italian accent. Ill GIRL WITH MONKEY BY ROSALBA CARRIERA {Louvre) CHAPTER V WHEREIN WE SEE THE PASTEL COME INTO FRANCE IN A VENETIAN lady's BAGGAGE The halting of that carriage before an inn in a street of Paris, in this year of 1720 — Orleans and the infamous Cardinal Dubois having still some two or three years to rule over the land — was to have a consider able influence upon French art, and on the sixteen-year-old lad of St. Quentin, Maurice de La Tour, most of all, for it was to have a profound effect upon his career, and to guide his footsteps into the path that was to lead to mastery. Amongst the travellers there stepped down from the diligence, at her journey's ending from Venice, a lady named Rosalba Camera, bringing with her in a satchel sundry coloured chalks, which were soon to be known throughout all France as "pastels." Rosalba Carriera, to become world-famous as Rosalba, to be spoken of by Watteau and our own Reynolds and the greatest artists for many a long day with the breath of respect, as though they uttered a name that ranked with the great dead, was the daughter of an official of the later days of the Venetian Republic. Born in Venice on the 7th of October 1765, she had shown even as a girl considerable artistry in designing for point-lace ; and, had not the vogue for the dainty thing changed in the fickle way of the fashions in such things, she might have ended her days amidst the making of these pretty fineries. The fashion flew ; and, as luck would have it, there happened to be living in Venice a Frenchman, Jean Steve, whose skill in painting snuff-boxes was widely known — the snuff-box, be it remembered, was a universal necessity, to be found in every man's pocket ; and the more dandified 23 24 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. folk prided themselves on the beauty of its form and elaborate decora tion, paying handsome prices for the costly things, as though they bought rare jewels. Jean Steve turned the hands' skill and pretty fancy of the girl to the ornamentation of these dainty toys ; whereby she came to painting with exquisite miniature-delicacy in oils. To the perfecting of her artistry she went into the studios of two or three masters ; but it was under Pietro Liberi that she won to style ; and was soon painting miniatures and working in coloured chalks. Gifted with a glowing sense of colour, which she used with astounding luminosity in the somewhat dry medium of the coloured chalk, dowered with a nervous sense of form and delicatesse of vision, she became so skilled in its use that her reputation rapidly spread abroad. She seems to have got a-roaming, for, in 1705, in her thirtieth year, she was elected a member of the Academy of St. Luke at Rome ; and five years later a member of the Academy of Bologna ; soon, thereafter, she was paid the great tribute of honour to an artist — the Grand Duke Cosmo the Third asked her to paint her own portrait for the famous collection at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Membership of the Academy of Florence followed. Renowned all over artistic Italy, it was but natural that she should seek the conquest of new territory, and have been drawn to Paris ; whither she bent her steps in 1720, in her forty-fifth year. She arrived in Paris with her mother and two sisters, Angela and Giovanna (that youngest sister Giovanna Camera, who was to make considerable repute as a painter of miniatures, dying in 1737), together with the husband of Angela, the Venetian painter, Antonio Pellegrini. Immediately Rosalba Camera became the rage. Her pleasing .pastels were soon the talk of the town — its new sensation. Rosalba Camera came to her year of triumph in Paris a plain woman and forty-five ; but she had been dowered with rare personal charm and with the rarest of all gifts, genius in artistry — originality of conception. She was not without skill also with her pen, as her diary, kept during this year of her stay in Paris, abundantly proves ; for her shrewd eyes saw the brilliant court of the Regency, and her pen v THE PASTEL COMES INTO FRANCE 2$ recorded what she saw, with keen judgment and insight ; and her gossip of it all found its way into the printed book in after-years — the Abbe Vianelli published it during the terrible year of 1793. She made few enemies — her modesty lulled jealousies. Her influence was prodigious. The name of Rosalba passed into the mouths of the collectors and amateurs of Europe as though she were a peer of the masters of ancient Italy. Lord Orford in England, writing of Francis Cotes, as high praise compares him with Rosalba. Rosalba Camera came in the nick of time. She became the rage. She stayed in Paris for a year, the vogue to be painted by her being almost a frenzy, the greatest at Court and in the world of fashion sitting to her — amongst them the Regent, the ten-year-old king Louis the Fifteenth, and many of the old nobility. Nor was her triumph the vogue of a mere fashion of the Court. Watteau paid her the mighty tribute of his admiration, and with Rigaud, Largilliere, Coypel, Crozat, the gossiping Mariette of Abecedario fame — a man not above spites on occasion — and the epigrammatic clear-sighted Comte de Caylus, amongst others, eagerly sought her society and bought the works of her hands. The Royal Academy of France set aside its wonted suspicion of, and enmity to, women ; and elected her a member with enthusiasm, no single voice uttering a Nay. Several painters of that august body paid her the sincerest flattery of imitating her — Charles Coypel amongst the number ; but generously as she delivered up the secret of her hand's craft, she could not yield the mystery of her feminine and native atmosphere. Rosalba Camera stayed but a year in Paris, going back to Venice in 1 72 1, to that wide vogue that made her an European fame which compelled upon every traveller through the City on the Waters the need to have a portrait wrought by her clever fingers as though it were a witness to the visit. She went thereafter from Court to Court, Modena, Vienna and the rest, until her sight failed her at seventy-two (1747), when she returned to Venice, where she died ten years after wards (1757). Broadcast in Italy you may find the things she wrought 26 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch.v — in Venice, Chioggia, Padua, Turin, Florence ; Dresden is rich in her work ; the Louvre has five of her pastels, amongst them the Muse crowned with a Laurel, which was her reception-piece to the Academy which she adorned. But of all that this gifted Venetian woman did, perhaps nothing bore so rich a harvest as her simple act when she stepped into Paris on that day when she brought with her baggage into France the coloured chalks that are known as pastels. CHAPTER VI WHEREIN WE SEE A FAIRY GODMOTHER HIDE THE SCEPTRE OF FRANCE IN A STRANGE CRADLE The departing of Rosalba Carriera out of France left the Regent Orleans still some couple or three years of power over the land, during which the lad Maurice Quentin de La Tour, whatever little we may otherwise know of him, was passing from youth to the edge of manhood — and these his sixteenth to his nineteenth years no doubt saw him essaying the use of the pastel. In that same year of 1720 in which the pastel came into France and made Rosalba the rage of Paris, in another street of this very Paris where the runaway lad from Saint Quentin was working, the youth Francois Boucher, now seventeen, entered the studio of Lemoyne, the Academician and a famous painter of ceiling-pieces and the like — he who decorated the ceilings of Versailles with gods and goddesses so astoundingly well. Boucher was a brilliant, merry- hearted, blithe youth, hard-working and inventive ; and in a few months had passed from Lemoyne's to the designing of pictures and letter-pieces and confirmation-cards and such things at the studio of Pere le Cars' print-shop in the Rue Saint Jacques, for the engravers to work upon, in return for his food, lodging, and sixty livres a month ; and accounted his fortune made. The cheery youth went at his work at Cars' with enthusiasm, turning his deft hand and nimble brain to anything that came to him ; living as hotly at his work as at his pleasures — and he went at both with a will — free-handed, bright-natured, genial, quick of eye and facile of finger. 27 28 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. Here also worked with him Laurent Cars, afterwards to come to high repute as an engraver, son to old Pere Cars. The two youths became fast friends. Here also came a youth, Jean Baptiste Perronneau, flitting through the studios behind old Pere Cars' shop, of whose youth little else is known ; but we shall see him emerge anon as a painter, and no mean one — and of pastels a master. So the student youths lived their gay, careless, industrious lives in the gay, careless, laughing, rollicking Paris of the Regency, springing up to man's estate ; Boucher, at least, eagerly taking part, between hard bouts of work, in the students' competitions for the Royal Academy. Thus the youngsters, apprenticed to their art, and on the edge of manhood, were living their student life in Paris when, on the 29th day of December 1722, near at hand in another corner of the city, there happened a little thing that was to have a profound effect upon all France, from high to low, from end to end of her, and not least of all upon French art — most of all, perhaps, upon the handsome boy of twelve who sat upon the throne of France under the Regent's tutelage. Yet Paris ceased no single moment from her work or her pleasures to hail the coming of it ; no heralds announced it in the streets with blare of trumpets ; no bells were set a-ringing. It chanced in simple privacy enough. To a financial fellow of more than shady reputation, one Poisson, a company-promoting rogue such as lives upon the toil of others, there was born a little girl -child whom they christened Jeanne Antoinette Poisson — or, as we should say, Jane Fish ; as indeed the lampooners were to say it, and the loose mouths of the vulgar to bawl it, in ribald song, up and down the streets of Paris and the length of France in the years to come. Yet it was the child's least offence, and not of her doing. For, in the cradle of little Jane Fish, good and evil fairies flinging therein their mixed largesse of virtues and vices and agonies and talents and rewards, her fairy godmother (or her evil genius) stealthily hid amongst the pretty IV TETE PENCHEE BY LA TOUR {At St. Quentin) vi THE SCEPTRE OF FRANCE 29 little morsel's skirts the diadem and sceptre of France — and no doubt set the impish ones a-laughing. Indeed, such as were dowered with the seeing eye of the prophet could have foretold that the girl-child was at no very distant day to become a marchioness of France : and no ordinary one, but Marquise de Pompadour, whom the world shall know in immortal fame of infamy as thief of a king's will and filcher of his sceptre — as of France's honour and majesty. But this is not as yet. The child's father, or he that is in the law father, is banished upon enforced absence from his home these many months for certain ugly mishandlings of public monies. Nor is Madame any better than she need be — indeed, we shall see her stooping to blacker dishonour. However, the favoured one, Lenormant de Tournehem, is a man of wealth and great possessions and of taste in art and letters. He is also a loyal soul to Madame and the little Jane, and greatly enamoured of both — becomes watchful guardian over the little one. The child is born, little Jane Fish, with the silver spoon in her mouth. But there is teething forward, and dainty childhood to be lived, and bewitching girlhood, that needs some sixteen or seventeen years in the achieving ; and wilful young womanhood ; and sundry and sly adventures that none but the Pompadour's dead lips may ever reveal ; and marriage to a dapper little fellow full of dignity and self-respect — one Lenormant d'Etioles, nephew to Lenormant de Tournehem, in which more becoming and trippingly romantic syllables the rough accents of Jane Fish shall disappear and be for gotten, or at least set aside, before the world of fashion hears of the beauty as Madame d'Etioles, soon after to be translated to Madame de Pompadour, when more than one of our careless art-students shall one day meet her. On the day, almost the last day of that year of 1722, on which this little girl was born, the years of the Regency of Orleans were numbered. The February of the new year saw the boy -king, Louis the Fifteenth, declared to be of man's estate at 30 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. vi thirteen — an unlucky number as gossips say. Before this year of 1723 was out, Orleans and his boon-companion the Cardinal Dubois were not only fallen from power, but were dead from their excesses — the Cardinal Dubois in the August, leaving behind him the curse of his legacy of the bull " Unigenitus " that is to make a hell of so many homes throughout this fair France ; and Orleans soon after him, suddenly struck dead by stroke of apoplexy. CHAPTER VII WHEREIN A LAWYER'S, SON CHANGES HIS NAME ; AND DISCOVERS THAT THE PRINTING-PRESS IS THE WEAPON OF MIGHT In the last year of the Grand Monarque's reign Voltaire wrote his tragedy of QSdipe ; at the King's death, on Orleans seizing power and ousting the Duke of Maine, illegitimate and favourite son of Louis XIV., the Duchess of Maine, a grand-daughter of the great Conde, went into opposition to the Court forthwith ; and at her instigation young Voltaire wrote a scandalous satire on the Regent and his profligate daughter. By consequence, in May 171 6 the " Sieur Arouet " found himself exiled to the dull town of Sully — here he was soon enjoying himself at the Due de Sulli's ; but, wearying of it, he wrote a flattering poem to Orleans, denied his former offence, and was allowed back to Paris by the easy-going Regent. He returned to Paris to lodgings instead of to his father's house ; and the old notary's dread of the corruption of his twenty -three- year- old son by the friendship of the great was further increased. Voltaire was now being secretly watched by the network of spies of the Regency ; but, egged to it by the Duchess of Maine, he was soon lampooning the Regent again. In the May of 1717 he was arrested and lodged in the Bastille, where he was held a prisoner for a year. But he was a fascinating wit, and was soon dining with the governor of the prison. Privileges followed ; and his restless brain had food to keep it from starving. He wrote in the Bastille the second canto of the dramatic poem which he afterwards completed as the famous Henriade, an attack on the anti-Protestant aristocracy. On April 10, 171 8, at his father's intervention, young Arouet was set at liberty on the condition that he lived with his father, which he 31 32 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. did to the end of the old man's life. Whilst in prison, the young fellow had brooded upon the odium that now attached to his name ; and on leaving it, taking Moliere's example (who had changed his name from Poquelin), he altered his name of Arouet to Voltaire, sup posed to be an anagram upon Arouet, 1. j. — Arouet le jeune. With his change of name certainly came his first triumphant success. QZdipe was fixed to be played on the 18th of November 171 8 at the Comedie Francaise. It was enthusiastically received. Such lines as " Priests are not what foolish folk take them to be ; their wisdom lies only in our gullibility " went home to sceptical France. Even the Regent and his notorious daughter the Duchesse de Berri went to see it ; and Voltaire dedicated the book of the play to the Regent's wife. An obsequious letter by Voltaire to the Regent, in which he demurely says that he deserves to owe some higher obliga tion to His Royal Highness than a year's correction in the Bastille, brought a pension of £50 a year to him from the Regent's privy purse — an astute move of the Regent to buy so dangerous a pen. Voltaire learnt his lesson and never again openly attacked a French sovereign. Arouet, the father, died on the New Year of 1722. Voltaire received a royal pension of £80 (2000 livres) shortly afterwards, which with the Regent's pension now made up his steady income to £130 a year, say about £400 a year in present money. The benefit was great to the poet, for his second play of Artemire in 1720 had been a dire failure. Left homeless by his father's death, Voltaire entered into an agreement with the Marquis de Bernieres and his Marchioness, that he and his jackal Theriot should live with them. The Bernieres were keen gamblers in matters financial — it was the rage — and the calculat ing couple saw their way through Voltaire to influence at, and in formation from, the Court. Voltaire, for his part, was on questionably intimate terms with the Marchioness. His hosts lived near Rouen when not in Paris. Voltaire eagerly launched himself into their financial schemes, in which he was to have a share. It was during one of these visits to Versailles to the Minister of War that he found at dinner with vii THE PRINTING-PRESS 33 the Minister, the Army officer Beauregard whose espionage had sent Voltaire to the Bastille. Voltaire's temper got the better of him, and he said hotly : " I know full well that spies are paid ; but I was not aware until now that to dine at the table of a Minister was a part of their reward ! " Beauregard held his tongue ; but Voltaire's carriage was stopped at the Bridge of Sevres, and Beauregard, ordering Voltaire to descend, caned him so brutally that he left a scar upon his face. Voltaire was soon afterwards travelling in Holland with Madame de Rupelmonde, a beautiful widow, whose perplexities about religious belief drew forth Voltaire's famous poem " For and Against," in which he first states what is his Belief and what his Unbelief, attacking that part of Pascal's Jansenism that makes the Deity create men foredoomed to eternal punishment ; he attacks also the Incarnation and the Atone ment ; but speaks his belief of the divine morality of Christ ; and enunciates his allegiance to the Most High's religion of Nature — assures her that her soul cannot be the object of God's undying hatred, that the heart of the just is the precious thing ; that a charitable or honest pagan will find more favour than a pitiless Jansenist or ambitious pontiff; that God is above being honoured, and is only offended by unjust deeds — judges us by our virtues, not by our sacrifices. Voltaire had gone to Holland to try and get his Henriade published, the censor refusing him publication in France ; and, during his stay, was astounded by the liberty of the people, political and religious ; by the thrift and energy and industry of Amsterdam compared with frivolous Paris and courtier-haunted Versailles. The great went on foot, and met the little on terms of equality — there was no idleness, no insolence, no poverty. He returned to France to find it impossible to get leave for the publishing of Henriade — sent back all subscriptions — and was baffled. Suddenly he decided to have it secretly printed at Rouen, and smuggled into Paris. Thus France's only national epic came to light ; and its success was wide — a Protestant as hero, Queen Elizabeth of England praised, and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew condemned, caused exultation. It was during its printing that the Duke of Orleans died. CHAPTER VIII WHICH HINTS OF THE ILL LUCK THAT IS IN THIRTEEN The lad who sat upon the throne of France as Louis the Fifteenth, declared to be of man's estate at thirteen upon that bleak February day of 1723, became lord of a France vastly changed from the France of other days. Wealth had changed hands. Louis the Fourteenth had enriched, ennobled, and granted power to the great burgess class in his skilful scheme to check the encroachment of the ancient noblesse upon his sovereignty. The wild gamble for riches during the Regency under the Scottish gambler Law had made many rich almost in a night who had never dreamed of wealth — and as many poor who had aforetime been greatly rich. The newly rich, without social position or ancestral splendour, vied with each other to come near to the fashions of the Court and to outshine in luxury the stately homes of the old nobility, many of them greatly impoverished. A rage set in for daintily furnished rooms ; elegance became a god. All Paris clamoured for pictures and for the furnishments of the best craftsmen. It, was the harvest of the artists. The government that fell from the hands of the dead Orleans passed into the care of the indolent, dull, and incompetent Duke of Bourbon, lineal heir of the great Conde — the clumsy plaything of his intriguing and violent mistress, the Marchioness de Prie, who had succeeded to the secret pension of England which had bribed the infamous Cardinal Dubois. She in turn was the creature of the unscrupulous financier Paris Duverney. The thirteen-year-old boy upon the throne had been betrothed 34 V LOUIS XV. BY LA TOUR {Louvre) ch.viii THE ILL LUCK IN THIRTEEN 35 to the little Infanta of Spain, a child of three, who had thereupon been brought to France to be educated. The Spanish king offended Madame de Prie by refusing to make her husband a grandee of Spain ; and she eagerly leaped at the chance of revenge. The feeble health of the sickly lad upon the throne made his advisers anxious to secure early an heir to the royal line ; and their anxiety made them an easy prey to this scheming woman. The little Infanta had scarce been in France two years when the child was bundled out over the frontier into Spain again without courtesy or excuse ; and Bourbon and his mistress, failing to win an English princess, married the fifteen- year-old king to Marie Leczinska, the amiable daughter of Stanislas, the dethroned King of Poland, on the 4th of September 1725. The gross insult to the haughty Philip of Spain roused the bitter anger of a proud people. It was an ugly business for France, and one that cost her bitter payment. But the woman De Prie, nudged to it by Duverney, pushed her daring too far. She pressed Bourbon to inflame the young King against his preceptor and confidential friend, Fleury, Bishop of Frejus. Fleury promptly retired to his country-house at Issy and sent his resignation to the King. Called back by the lad, at the promptings of his nobles at the Court, Fleury insisted on the dismissal of Madame de Prie and Duverney — she being exiled into Normandy, he sent to the prison of the Bastille. Bourbon received an order to retire to his domain at Chantilly, and obeyed in silence, knowing that power was fallen from him. Fleury was made Minister in his stead and raised to the rank of cardinal. The youthful King showed an astounding promise of future astuteness in calling to supreme power the moderate and pacific Cardinal Fleury, whose seventy years were spotless clean, whose name stood for integrity and high honour, and whose coming seventeen years of government were to lift France out of chaos and dishonour and ruin, to give the land tranquillity awhile, repair the nation's losses, extend her commerce, and thereby increase her wealth and prosperity, marred by few disasters. CHAPTER IX WHEREIN THE YOUTH MAURICE QUENTIN DE LA TOUR APPEARS AGAIN AWHILE, TO DISAPPEAR AGAIN, STEALING AWAY FROM THE LAW AND THE GOSSIPS It is in the year of 1723, the boy-king Louis the Fifteenth being declared to be arrived at man's estate at thirteen, that the record of a police-court scandal suddenly lifts the veil from the shadowy life of the youth Maurice Quentin de La Tour in his nineteenth year, and discovers him more earnestly engaged, in sordid fashion enough, upon the sowing of wild oats rather than in the race to win the bays of immortality by skill of artistry. On the third day of November in 1723 was written in the archives of Laon a sentence pronounced by her judges upon a poor maiden, Anne Bougier, for having given birth secretly to a still-born child on the 15th of August without having beforehand declared her coming motherhood. This offence was, strange to say, in these strange times a serious breach of the laws, and as severely punished (indeed, had been for close upon a hundred years) as child-murder. The seduced girl, however, escaped with an admonition from her judges and a fine of three livres, to be handed over to the poor of the town. The judges, taking account of the circumstances, removed the full blame from Anne Bougier, setting down the blame of her fall to one of the name of Maurice Quentin de La Tour, a youth of nineteen years, a painter by calling, living at Saint Quentin, and her first cousin ; a decision that proves the high honour of the magistracy even in these corrupt days — that magistracy that we shall see emerge 36 ch.ix MAURICE QUENTIN DE LA TOUR 37 throughout these trying times into supreme guidance over the noble destinies of France. The girl, three years older than the young artist, was a little dressmaker — the act of accusation puts it " a knitter of stockings " — her father a chanter at the church of Sens, her grandfather a master-mason of Laon, as was also the grandfather of Maurice Quentin de La Tour, her cousin and her seducer. The grandfather, Jean de La Tour, had gone to Saint Quentin to help in the rebuilding of the great steeple (" bell-tower ") of its collegiate church, and had died there, whilst engaged on the work, leaving by his wife, Marie Garbe, also of Laon, four sons and a daughter, Anne de La Tour ; one of the sons, the trumpeter Francois, being the artist's father ; whilst the daughter, Anne de La Tour, by her marriage with Philippe Bougier, a singer of the cathedral of Sens, became the mother to the unfortunate maid Anne Bougier. The girl and her mother had settled at Saint Quentin in 1722, in the humble career of knitters of stockings ; and there the intimacy between the young artist and his pretty cousin passed rapidly from affection to passion, and the old sad story. To prevent scandal in the home of the La Tours at Saint Quentin the mother of the girl packed off with her at the New Year to Laon to conceal the birth of the child, which was born dead eight months afterwards. The poor girl was denounced by some busybody ; and thus it came about that a couple of months thereafter we see her standing forsaken and alone at the bar of judgment answering for a sin that should never have been made a charge against her, and should never have been put upon the unfortunate maid, least of all by her cousin Maurice Quentin de La Tour. The news of the ugly business came to Saint Quentin, and the young artist made a hurried flight from his native town. The youth saw that the scandal of it would make his home too unpleasant for him ; he fled to Reims and sought refuge in Cambrai. He left behind him a nasty reputation, which grew with gossip, and gathered about his name several stories which were as like as not invented to fit 38 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. the coat that the local wiseacres and scandalmongers cut out for him. But the young fellow seems to have taken the ugly business seriously enough. However, the gossip pen of D'Estrees adds a story to his reputation in which, at Cambrai, young La Tour was made ridiculous by a jealous husband who persuaded his pretty young wife to let La Tour into her room, and, at the sound of her husband's unexpected return, got the youth to hide himself in a basket that hung outside her window, where he swung suspended all night and, the next day being market-day, became the laughing-stock of the people who passed in the street below. The tale has all the signs of the garrulous babble of D'Estree's old age. Gossip ever fattens most greedily upon the uncertainties. According to some gossip accounts, the youth, although he must have been as raw in craftsmanship as in age, and must have been quite unknown, was taken up by the foreign diplomats and their ladies then assembled at Cambrai (January 1724) ; it is said that the English ambassador offered him a lodging in his house in London, whither he went from Cambrai. It is certain, at any rate, that to London the young fellow went. The Canon Duplaquet, pronouncing at Saint Quentin, the year after La Tour's death, his eulogy upon his famous fellow-townsman the dead artist, stated that in London the young man " rapidly advanced in the practice of his art and the study of letters, of nature, and of Man in morals, in citizenship, and in politics." The young artist-philosopher seems to have jumped somewhat quickly into the understanding of man the citizen and politician ! This journey to London, and the length of his stay thereat, are a somewhat perplexing affair. " It is in youth," says Champfleury neatly, " that the eyes of an artist see clean ; images that enter are deeply engraved thereon." La Tour would surely be struck by the numerous portraits by Vandyke and Sir Peter Lely then to be seen in England, and rated highly ! After all, a portrait-painter does not arrive in one stride without coming under the influences of his forerunners ; indeed, criticism to-day chiefly preens itself on being able to discover every MADEMOISELLE DANGEVILLE By De La Tour at St. Quentin ix MAURICE QUENTIN DE LA TOUR 39 new artist's indebtedness and on casting the discovery in their faces, as though it thereby wholly damned their originality. Desportes had been in London in 171 2, Watteau in 1720, and others besides. La Tour, as they did, must have seen some of the works of art in which London was rich. Which of them shows the slightest influence on his style ? Where had he learnt sufficient English to enable him to test and weigh Man in morals or as citizen or in politics ? Answer comes there none. It was necessary to account in after years for his genius ; therefore it was attempted. It may have been so ; and again it may not. Amongst the certainties alone stands out of the mists clear and precise that gray court-house with the poor forsaken little knitter of stockings at bay before a foolish law, illumined by the dignity and humanity of her judges, the record of which reads like an exquisite page torn from out a fantastic nightmare. She married, this Anne Bougier, an artisan of the name of Becasse ; and returned with him to live in St. Quentin, where she died on the 25th of July 1740, when her lover was famous, an Academician, and painting the four daughters of his King. The adventure and fall of poor Anne Bougier left a deep scar on the artist's soul and branded his heart and mind. We shall see him at the end of his great career, a man honoured by the highest in the land, almost in the last conscious act of his long life, paying as best he could his unpayable debt, and making public atonement for this wrong that he did in his early manhood. CHAPTER X WHEREIN A FRENCHMAN GOES INTO ENGLAND ; AND MUCH IS IN THE JOURNEY FOR ALL FRANCE To the beautiful Marquise de Prie, Bourbon's mistress, Voltaire had been presented ; he was soon one of her favourites. She gave him lodging at Fontainebleau for the marriage of the young fifteen-year-old King on September 4, 1725, to Marie Leczinska, with whom he also was soon in great favour, and whose privy purse now added a pension of £60 a year (1500 livres) to his estate. A favourite of these two powerful women, all had seemed to smile upon Voltaire when the blackest calamity of his life fell upon him — and out of a petty squabble. In the December of 1725, in his thirty-second year, he was at the Opera in Paris, in the famous Adrienne Lecouvreur's box, when some arrogant remark of his irritated a young blood, the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot of the great house of Rohan. The young fellow was probably jealous of the brilliant wit. Rohan-Chabot addressed him sneeringly about his change of name. Voltaire replied with sharp retort. The chevalier lifted his cane, and Voltaire's hand was about to draw his sword, when Adrienne fainted, and nothing more was said. Bitter satires on De Rohan were soon going about, and Voltaire's reputation for lampooning was well known. A few days afterwards, Voltaire was dining with the Due de Sulli, when he was told that he was wanted below. On reaching the carriage-door he was seized, held from behind, and thrashed and ill-treated by six ruffians ; De Rohan, in another carriage near by, directing the courageous act ! Furious with rage, Voltaire rushed back to the 40 ch.x A FRENCHMAN GOES INTO ENGLAND 41 dinner-table, and telling his story, found it coldly received, whilst the Due de Sulli refused to accompany him to the police or to meddle in the matter. Thence Voltaire drove to the Opera and appealed to Madame de Prie, who confessed she dare not raise a finger against the house of Rohan. Voltaire then took lessons in fencing, with intent to challenge to a duel ; but the spies were reporting him ; and on the 17th April he again found himself in the Bastille. However, he got permission to go to England. And he went with high hopes, in the May of 1726, whither the law protected the lowest as well as the highest. He went as the guest of Sir Everard Fawkener (Liotard made a portrait of him) at Wandsworth, of Bolingbroke, and of Peterborough at Parson's Green, and recom mended to the most famous Englishmen of the day — Walpole, the Duke of Newcastle, Bubb Dodington, Pope, Swift, Gay, Congreve, Thomson, Young. His only sorrow in England was the news of the loss of his sister, whom he loved. He was feted and lionised. He set to work to learn English. He was profoundly impressed by the liberty of the people. Sir Isaac Newton was dying ; but Voltaire met his beautiful and brilliant niece, met also the old Duchess of Marlborough, Lord Chesterfield, and the Herveys, and was soon on friendly terms with George the Second's queen, Caroline, and his mistress, Lady Sandon. But Voltaire ever kept the main object of his visit to England before him, and we find him At the Sign of the White Peruke in Maiden Lane busy upon the printing of his Henriade. In March 1728 it appeared in print, dedicated to Queen Caroline. He remained a year longer in England, until, after three years' exile, he was allowed to return to France in the spring of 1729. Working the while on his Letters on the English, his Brutus, and his History of Charles XIL, he made a deep study of the English people, profoundly stirred as he was by the advanced state of their liberty, their laws, and their conduct. He was to go back to France imbued with the philosophy of Newton. He noticed that the large G 42 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. x number of religions in England was a safeguard against the bitterness and persecutions of a State church like the Jesuits in France, and of the bigoted revengefulness of the Jansenists, their enemies. " If in England," he writes in his Letters on the English, to bring out the contrast of what he admired in free England with what he hated in despotic France, " there were only one religion, its despotism would be to be dreaded ; if there were only two, their followers would cut each other's throats ; but there are thirty of them, and they live in peace and happiness." But if there were one thing that bit deeper than all it was the coming of freedom to England out of rebellion and civil war. He wrote words in these Letters on the English that were to bear heavy fruit. " Doubtless the establishing of Liberty in England has been costly ; in seas of blood it was that despotism had been drowned ; but the English do not account the price that they paid to have been too high. Other nations have not had fewer troubles, have not poured out less blood ; but the blood that they have shed in the cause of liberty has but served to cement their slavery. . . . You do not in England hear of one kind of justice for the upper class, another for the middle class, another for the lowest. . . . Because he is a noble or an ecclesiastic, an Englishman is not exempt from paying certain taxes. . . . All taxes are ordered by the House of Commons. . . . The peasant eats white bread ; he is well clad ; he is not afraid to increase the number of his cattle, or to cover his roof with tiles, lest his taxes be raised the next year." He was struck, too, by the greatest families going into commerce, and increasing the nation's wealth, and of its being a more virile calling than that of upper flunkeydom about the King's person at Versailles. The writings of Newton and Locke he wholly absorbed. From the satirical methods of Woolston and the English Deists he added largely to the battery of his coming attack on "superstition" in France. VI CHARDIN BY LA TOUR {Louvre) CHAPTER XI WHEREIN A GREAT SOUL IS SEEN TO SHINE IN A SMALL BODY Chardin the while was winning to ever-increasing success in his art, for all his modesty and simplicity of life. A short man, " strong and muscular," his round genial face, benevolent aspect, and honest eyes were well fitted to his solid, serious, middle-class figure. He was of that class that kept its tradition of good-fellowship and loyalty and uprightness of conduct amidst all this fantastic century of Louis Quinze. His reserve covered a high sense of dignity ; and he was implicitly trusted by all who came in contact with him. Yet shy as he was of personal advertisement or of thrusting himself forward, modest as he was about himself and his art, his blood rose hotly at an insult or a vulgar slight, as he proved when he flung the insolent lackey of the wealthy Crozat, Baron de Thiers, down the stairs. He was a supreme painter. His criticism, though it was said to err on the side of encouraging every one, was sound, and he gave many profound maxims to the studios. An artist had been boasting before him of ways he had discovered whereby to purify and perfect his colours ; Chardin brushed him aside with his deep saying : " What ! sir — you say that one paints with colours ? " " With what, then ? " gasped the astounded other. " One uses colours," said Chardin, " but one paints with the feelings." His goodness to students was a by-word. He knew no meanness, no jealousy, no pettiness. Amongst artists he was ever the peace maker. He was a born encourager. 43 44 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. He knew no greed. He sold his pictures for what was offered for them. His joy was in the achieving. Around him Romance flung no cloak of picturesque adventures. His art needed no enhancement. His was a humdrum existence, first in his home in the little Rue Princesse, which he was only to leave when he went to take up his quarters in the Louvre at the State's granting him that honour. He was of the type of man to whom nothing " happens " — except the grey toil for livelihood, and only too often a harsh marriage, with which he fortunately was not to be cursed. It is interesting to see that this very year in which he was elected to the Academy he showed pictures in public, as Boucher had done, at what was called the Exposition de la Jeunesse, a quaint custom amongst young artists when they displayed their work in the Place Dauphin, where on the day of the Fete-Dieu the people were compelled to decorate the place by hanging out their finest tapestry and carpets from the windows during the procession, from six in the morning to midday. Here had shown the work of their hands, Lancret, Rigaud, Lemoyne, Oudry, De Troy, Coypel, Boucher, Nattier ; and from these displays men had been elected Academicians; Chardin was to add to the number. Chardin showed his now famous La Raie, the Buffet, and ten other pictures of " dead nature." The effect was prodigious. A new artist had arisen who was the peer of the great Flemish masters ! Urged to it by his friends, he presented himself for election to the Academy on the 2nd of September 1728, and was elected in his twenty-ninth year amidst great enthusiasm. He had the high honour of being " accepted " (agree) and admitted (" recu ") at the same time, his two pictures of Le Buffet and Une Cuisine being selected as his pictures-of-reception. Chardin had sold his pictures for modest sums that made it impossible for him to live by his art, for he was a slow and finished worker. His lack of means had put off the marriage with Marguerite xi A GREAT SOUL IN A SMALL BODY 45 Sainctar, arranged by his father. He had met the girl at one of the little dances of the tradesfolk in their quarter. Then the girl lost her parents, and, her fortune gone, had to take refuge with her tutor, one Perant, a small merchant who had his shop in the Rue de la Verrerie, in which street Boucher had been born, but living in the Rue Princesse near by, or rather the Rue Ferou off it. The carpenter, maker of billiard-tables, forthwith banned the girl. But Chardin was a loyal and honourable man, and held to the distressed damsel. They were married on the ist of February 173 1. They went to live in the Rue Princesse with Chardin's parents ; and there his life was spent until his second marriage in 1744. The house is still to be seen, in the ill-lit rooms and courts of which he painted some of the masterpieces of his age and of all time. Here was born his son, Pierre Chardin, whose brilliant promise as a painter was to be shattered, as was his father's pride and hopes in him, by his early death. Two years afterwards (1733) was born his little girl, Marguerite Agnes, who died in her second year, on the same day, 14th April 1735, as her mother. In 1734 Chardin began painting that series of figures at their daily employment which greatly increased his reputation. It is interesting to note that whilst Chardin lived he was contrasted with Teniers — always to Chardin's disadvantage by the critics ! Aved is said to have turned upon Chardin with contemptuous " Do you imagine that a portrait is as easy to paint as furred tongues or sausages ? " Where are Aved's portraits now ? . . . Meanwhile, in Geneva, the young man Liotard was making rapid strides with his art in Petitot's studio ; and besides painting and enamelling, was essaying the new art of the pastel that was the craze in Paris, when, in 1725, he got packing and left for the French capital to try his fortunes. He became the pupil of Masse, thence went into the studio of Lemoyne, Boucher's old master. At Lemoyne's young Liotard caused quite a sensation ; his work was soon in considerable request. Learning engraving, he did several plates after Watteau. CHAPTER XII WHEREIN WE SEE THE GHOST OF WATTEAU WALK, AND TAKE POSSESSION OF THE SEVENTEEN HUNDREDS The year 1723 that saw the young King declared to be of man's estate, and drew the veil from the youth of Maurice Quentin de La Tour in a police-court scandal, was of vital significance also to Francois Boucher. His dogged efforts during the intervals of hard work in Pere Cars' engraving studios to win the student's prize of the Royal Academy were rewarded at last. He won the envied bays of studentship ; was carried shoulder-high round the court yard of the old palace of the Louvre by his boisterous and delighted comrades, and was set down at his lodgings an eleve couronne. The collectors forthwith began to notice the young fellow. Every one has a good word for genial, unjealous, warm-hearted Francois Boucher. Not that he really needed orders to make him work. He can rub along what with one thing or another. He paints for sheer joy in the doing. " His studio is his church." He is a born giver — gives himself to his work, to his friends, to his pleasures, to all he does, with both hands. Gives the work, upon which he has laboured with all his strength, to his friends free-handedly when done. Fame grows apace — if expensively. It was in the year after Boucher entered the engraving studio of Pere Cars, the year after Rosalba Carriera brought the pastel into France, that Watteau died — the eager life burnt out the afflicted, feeble body. The effect of the dead young artist's career upon the art of France was prodigious. He moulded the whole 46 VII MARECHAL DE SAXE BY LA TOUR {Louvre) ch.xh THE GHOST OF WATTEAU 47 thought, gave eyes to the whole vision, form to the whole sense, atmosphere to the whole dream of the France of the age of Louis the Fifteenth. His haunting sweet melancholy, his rich and tuneful colour, his harmonies and his taste, that created the Fetes gallantes, usurped all other art of former days, and overwhelmed the taste of the Court of France, like a flood, for the greater part of the seventeen hundreds, until her ancient magnificence was blown into shreds by the vast and sudden upheaval of the French Revolution. Boucher came under the spell of Watteau's charm even as he used his 'prentice hand at Cars' engraving studios, for he was given the drawings of the dead genius to engrave, and joyed in the doing, taking in the act the mantle that fell from Watteau's shoulders. Watteau brought to the young Boucher the revelation of a pure French art, an art lisping with no foreign accent — a real, a live thing, that entered into his soul, and was to lead him to mastery. He saw that it was upon the soil of France that a French artist must look for the foundations on which to build his achievement. Watteau revealed the spirit of France to him. Thus in such varied and many enterprises, turning his wits to embellish everything that came to his hand, and in this keen study of nature and the laws of his art, Boucher spent some four years as eleve couronne ; then, it being necessary to complete an artistic education in Rome, to Rome at twenty -five he went. Of his doings in Rome or Italy during these wander-years little is known. The eager imagination is easily made idle by the over whelming sense and sounds and sights of a new place ; and the treasures of Italy, above all of Rome and Venice, haunted by splendid ghosts that walk amidst superb scenery, might well silence for a while and still the industry of a man whose eyes had so much to feed upon. A spiteful tongue has sneered at the young fellow's verdict upon the famed masterpieces of the great Italians, that he found Raphael " insipid," Carrache " gloomy," and Michelangelo " contorted." So far from being an object for derision, Boucher in 48 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. uttering such judgments showed himself a man of genius who held high promise for France. The great Italians had passed into a fatuous stage of idolatry that meant destruction, nay, annihilation, to European art. Boucher showed an admirable courage and a sincerity and freedom from artistic snobbery and pedantry far too rare in the presence of the great dead. The day that he uttered those words, the art of France was free ; here was a Frenchman at last with a downright and vigorous will to see for himself, to judge for himself, and to decide, instead of servilely peering through the spectacles of others — here was a man worthy to carry on the art of France revealed to him by the master gifts of the short-lived Watteau. To dare to state the faults of the great dead is not to deny them their mighty qualities. It does not follow that, because an artist has no particular sympathy with an old master, or is uninfluenced by that master, that he denies him power or does not feel his mighty qualities. Were Velasquez or Frans Hals in fluenced by Michelangelo or Raphael ? Are they the lesser thereby ? Are they not in some measure the greater ? The fact was that Boucher made the journey into Italy partly out of artistic curiosity, partly because he saw that no artist of his day could come to honour in the State without the Italian tour. 'Twas the Thing to Do — and Boucher was ever in the fashion. He was eager to try any experiment that might extend his craftsmanship. Come, says he — tongue in cheek and laughter in his merry eyes — let us see what Italy has to give us ; she plays the cat and banjo with the art of most of these fellows ; but perhaps she's not so bad as they say she's good. We'll see. His three wander-years in Italy done, he appears in Paris again with a number of paintings of sacred subjects which called forth the critics' praise for their "vigorous and virile beauty." Here, be it marked, we see Boucher grimly setting aside his own taste and doggedly making a prodigious and laborious effort, prolific in solemn attempts, to capture the conventional reputation and standing of the xii THE GHOST OF WATTEAU 49 "serious painter" — capturing thereby the admiration and eulogy of the bookish critics and the pompous approval of the tradition- spectacled Academicians. Besides this by no means useless discipline of his wide-ranging genius, in this solemn painting of religious subjects in the formal painting ofthe schools to which he addressed his gifts, and in which he doggedly restrained his great talents, he was winning to that repute as an historical painter which he knew full well was the only habit wherein the artist might in those days reach to worldly promotion. At twenty-eight, on the 4th of November 173 1, he was accepted (agree) by the Academy ; he had now but to paint an " historical picture " to take his seat as an Academician. On the edge of his thirties ; in the full vigour of early manhood ; back in his beloved Paris ; warmed by the atmosphere of the city that is all the world to a Parisian ; amongst friends ; thrilled by the pleasures and gaiety of the jigging life about him ; his fingers on the pulse of his age ; having done his drudge-work and won his call to the Academy ; secure of his seat thereat, he winked a shrewd eye at the gang of them, Academicians and critics, and gave rein to the original genius that was in him. He saw that however much his solemn make-believes, however freely translated from the old Italian masters of a dead day, might rouse the praise of bookish men or of hide-bound Academicians or of the critic steeped in formal tradition or of the moralist trying to bend art to inartistic achievements, the public were not tumbling over each other to possess themselves of pictures from the Old Testament, even when painted in the latest fashion. Boucher had no itch to preach to his age. He was a part of that age, and content to interpret the spirit of that age so far as it revealed itself to him, concerned as little with the deeds of the past as with the threat of the future. He was of those light-hearted folk that were enamoured of the gaiety of life, entertained only by the sunny side of life's highway, shrinking from the tragedies and the sordid things that strewed the other side of the road. And having won to his goal, with a shrug at the taste of that tradition to H So THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. which he had been compelled to bow before he could be elected to the Academy, and that had forced upon him infinite travail in achieving the fantastic foreign thing, as boys learn a parrot's jabber of Latin and straightway forget it when the hair is on the lip, he straightway turned his back upon the Old Book into which he had been dipping with a wry mouth the while, and betook himself to worship thenceforth in the temple where the Graces stood upon a flower-decked altar. The Italians had set their mistresses upon the altar of their pious faith to paint the Mother of God ; Boucher set Venus upon his altar to be his mistress. The smug Madonna of the Italians gave place to a Frenchified Venus. In 1732, in his twenty-ninth year, within twelve months of his election to the Royal Academy, he gave to the world his Marriage of the Children of God with the Children of Men, where Venus is the avowed object ofhis adoration. It caused considerable stir, and added greatly to his increasing reputation. Boucher found in Venus a goddess to whom he could whole heartedly devote great and rare powers of artistry ; and he found a France that was also making her its idol. From the day he entered into her court he revealed to the vast multitude of her devotees an exquisite appreciation of the beauty of woman. From that early day of his childhood that his father put the pencil into his small hands until that day when Death alone filched it from his numb fingers as he sat in the dawn before a picture of Venus upon his easel, waiting for the early daylight to let him work upon his last masterpiece, he set his eager life with equal devotion to work and to pleasure. A seat in the Academy and fame never drew him from work, whether masterpieces for the decoration of palaces or designs for the publishers of books. He devoured work. From the years when manhood came to him, and the instincts and appetites of man took possession of him, he worked often twelve hours a day, unsoured, and without losing to the end, when Death took him, his blitheness of heart or weakening the desires of his gadding spirit. They fulfilled each other, his toil and his play — he made of his xii THE GHOST OF WATTEAU 51 industry a vast pleasure ; of his pleasure as vast an industry. And Boucher, in uttering himself, uttered his age. The story ofhis love-affairs makes no romantic reading — common place ecstasies with nameless frail women. However, hard as he lived and worked or played or rioted, Boucher snatched a few moments from his thirtieth year (1733) to get himself married. The pretty little seventeen-year-old Parisienne, Marie Jeanne Buseau, was a beauty if the pens of the critics have value. We shall see La Tour making her picture in pastels soon after her marriage — a blonde beauty with blue eyes of an infinite tenderness, and a roguish smile ; she wears a white satin dress, cut low, her neck daintily befrilled in the mode ; she toys with a closed fan in her pretty fingers, that peep out of mittens of white lace. Nearly thirty years afterwards (1761), when she was forty-five, Roslin the Swede painted the dainty creature whom even Diderot, the man of growls, confesses to be " always beautiful " — indeed the beauty is said to have been dowered with a dainty form withal which was of service to Boucher in the painting of his goddesses, and she undoubtedly sat for his Psyche pieces. Marriage, it is true, did not turn Boucher to unmitigated faithful ness. But the beauty consoled herself airily enough, and strife was avoided. It was as excuse for meeting her that her lover, the Count de Tessin, Sweden's ambassador to France, commissioned Boucher to do the illustrations for the fairy-tale of Acajou. However, marriage, like pleasure, did not stay Boucher's hand from art. Two years were run since his nomination to the Academy ; it was necessary to present his " historic painting " before he might take his seat therein. He painted in this the year of his marriage the Renauld et Armide that hangs in the Louvre to-day ; the picture roused great interest, and called forth the praise of Diderot. But Boucher, secure of his seat in the Academy, forthwith flung the last rag of the old tradition out of his studio door, and gave himself wholly to his own imaginings. This canvas brought him to the King's notice ; and in the following year he got his first order from the Court whose painter he 52 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS was to become. Then came the host of infants and cupids flying into Boucher's studio and frolicked on to his painted canvases. And soon thereafter he invented those pastorals with shepherds and shepherdesses in pleasant landscapes which were his first essays in the style that was to bring him into so wide a vogue. La Tour was now his friend ; and at Huquier's he met and grew intimate with Meissonnier, the creator of rococo, who in the May of this 1736 stood godfather to Boucher's first-born son. Chardin, with consummate gifts of the first rank, and others with him, were bringing the Homely into the vogue. Boucher, always ready to grasp at the vogue, essayed the homely note ; but, charming as was his art, he was unfitted for the difficult task. In his La Belle Cuisiniere he cannot go into the scullery without dragging Venus in with him by the skirts. He cannot show a kitchen-wench as honest house-drudge ; he is more concerned with the accident of kissing in a kitchen than with the kitchen's normal habit. He must give life below stairs the romance of an intrigue. He essays to paint the " low classes " ; the hands are the hands of Esau, but the voice the voice of Jacob. He could not see the deeper significances of life — his brush could not refrain from making elegance and dandified manners peep out from behind the milkmaid's skirts or the coal-heaver's fustian. His delicate and sensitive nose flinched from the gutter as from pain ; he shrank from sorrow and suffering as from all unpleasant things. His eyes and ears were with the dance and gay airs and jollity. Of the sordid and miserable accent in the life of the people, of the weariness of the toil of the drudges, whose strenuous and ill-requited labour made the feast for the silken-dressed ones, he refused to know or hear a syllable or see a hint. From the very shadow of the tragic he skipped away and turned ever to the dance of life, to the flowers and the frantic merriment and the dandified make- believes. In him was the very atmosphere breathed by the so-called fortunate of the France of Louis the Fifteenth. VIII MADAME FAVART BY LA TOUR {At St. Quentin) xii THE GHOST OF WATTEAU 53 He was the predestined painter of the Court, and the Court took him. The looms of the famed tapestry-works at Gobelin called to him, and he wrought for them the great designs that are the glory of his age. And amidst this vast achievement he painted for the King the great models of The Tiger Hunt and The Crocodile Hunt, which were designed for the " Little Apartments " that the bored Louis had had set up in the roof of his palace of Versailles in which to rest after his return from hunting — those " Little Apartments " that were to become the scene of his orgies and intrigues, his favourite abiding-place. CHAPTER XIII WHEREIN GENIUS DISCOVERS THAT IT MUST STAND ALONE, AND SHUN THE LEANING ON THE STAFF OF OTHERS When Voltaire returned to France in 1729, thirty-five years of age, he had learnt to his bitter cost the folly of dependence on the favour of the great or on the fickle favour of theatre-goers. He determined to be rid of all dependence on others. The chance came, and almost as quick as the resolution, and in strange form. The French Government had issued a lottery to wipe out a debt. At a supper- party Voltaire heard La Condamine, the mathematician, say that the scheme was so unskilfully planned that if one person, or a group of persons, were to buy all the tickets, they would gain £40,000 (a million livres) ; forthwith the poet hurriedly formed a little company of men and bought the tickets — Voltaire pocketing a considerable portion of the profit. It became the foundation of a large fortune. It was indeed a fortunate act for Voltaire, since art did not serve him well on his return. Brutus was played in the December of 1739, and was a miserable failure ; the Charles XII. was seized by the authorities (1731), but, on being secretly printed at Rouen, had a considerable vogue. Eryphile, a drama played in 1732, failed pitifully ; but in the August of the same year he scored his great success with his drama Zaire. In the spring of 1733 Voltaire settled down in the house of a corn-merchant in Paris, with whom he embarked in a traffic in grain. Here he came to know Madame du Chatelet, his "divine limilie," whose father, the Baron de Breteuil, he had known at Court. She was in her twenty-seventh year, the wife of an indolent, easy- 54 ch. xiii GENIUS MUST STAND ALONE 55 going Army officer, the Marquis du Chatelet, who shut his eyes to his brilliant wife's infidelities. The tall, thin brunette, "fond of dress and dissipation," became passionately attached to Voltaire ; and he found in her rich intellect a comrade's strength. Voltaire's exporting of grain from Barbary came to an end in 1733 on the outbreak of war ; but Paris-Duverney, the financier, took him into the war commissariat, out of which the poet won £20,000. He was, besides, heavily concerned in other ventures, picture-dealing amongst many ; and as he was thrifty, his income steadily increased. Secretly printing his Letters on the English, he added to them some optimistic criticism in refutation of Pascal's pessimistic puritanism. Unfortunately, Voltaire had not given the word for publication when the book was launched upon Paris. He was with Madame du Chatelet at his friend the Duke of Richelieu's wedding when the news came. The book was condemned to be burnt by the Parliament of Paris on June 10, 1734, by the public hangman as " scandalous, contrary to religion, to morality, and to the respect due to authority " ; and a writ was issued for Voltaire's arrest. Voltaire was not to be found ; but, after a month in hiding, ventured forth to the tumbledown chateau of Cirey, which he had taken from Du Chatelet, and which was to become his home for many years. Here he and Madame du Chatelet furnished and restored a suite of apartments for themselves amidst the ruins, and allowed the Marquis to loll away his time when not with his regiment. Here at last Voltaire found a home, and a companion who was a constant help and friend to him. The amount of work he did was prodigious. Here he poured forth in verse his desire to make man contented with his lot — his belief that though unhappiness is everywhere, everywhere is happiness : to thank God for what happiness there is : to avoid puzzling the wits as to why man and Nature are what they are. " In belief in God there are difficulties ; in lack of belief, absurdities." And he trounced " the good old 56 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xiii times " — painting Adam and Eve supping on water and acorns, with thankfulness that he was a modern and a Parisian. This sent him to a short exile into Holland until the storm roused by it blew over. He was writing the dramas of L' Enfant Prodigue, Mahomet, and Merope ; and was pushing on with the scandalous poem of his life, the Pucelle, his Siecle de Louis Quatorze, and his Mceurs et Esprit des Nations ; and in 1736 he essayed to popularise the Elements of Newton's Philosophy, publishing it in 1741. In the August of 1736 Frederick of Prussia, then Crown Prince, and twenty-four, began his long correspondence with Voltaire. CHAPTER XIV WHICH DISCOVERS US LARGELY AT THE MERCY OF THE GOSSIPS That Maurice de La Tour went to Paris and entered the studio of an artist is certain, but at what date is now lost to us. La Tour was born in the year (1704) that saw the doors close on the last Salon of Louis the Fourteenth's reign, owing to financial difficulties, for the King was at his wits' end for money. They did not again open until thirty-three years afterwards, in 1737. The public record of the artist's career is thereby difficult to follow during his twenties and early thirties. That Du Pouche was his first acknowledged master we know, since we have the testimony of the artist's brother. La Tour drew Du Pouche's portrait in pastel, and after the artist was dead, his young brother bore witness as to whom it was, writing of it that it was " Du Pouche, the drawing-master of my brother." Also we know that the young fellow's early career as artist was not spent amidst one long song of praise. He early received a sharp lesson from the first painter to the King, the aged Boulogne, which left a strong impression upon him in after years ; for we have his own witness to it. Young La Tour had painted the portrait of the old painter's daughter-in-law, and Boulogne, struck by the power of the youth's skill of artistry, the quality of his colour and the directness of his handling, but fretted by and distressed at his lack of training in draughtsmanship, expressed his wish to meet the youth — and they met. The old artist seized him by the collar of his coat, dragged him in front of the portrait, and spake thus : " Look, you stupid fellow, if 57 1 58 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. you be worthy of the gift which nature has granted to you ! . . . Go and learn to draw — if you wish to become a man." That lesson bit deeper than any that Maurice Quentin de La Tour received in the studio of Du Pouche, his first master in Paris. For the rest, during those momentous years of his twenties, until the opening of the Salon of 1737 suddenly reveals him to the world an artist of the first rank of his age, gossip clashes with gossip, and gossip with likelihood — tale contradicts tale. When Maurice Quentin de La Tour returned to Paris it were not easy to say. That he had early decided on the new and fashionable medium of pastel is clear. And it suited the man's temperament wholly. It was delicate and subtle in colour, and quick in the handling. It did not fret his irritable nerves — all his life a curse to him — and it freed him from the smell of the oil-paint and the varnish, which sickened him and was utterly distasteful to him. The gossip of Mariette in his Abecedario tells us that La Tour found the pastel sympathetic to his hand — it took little time and prevented him wearying his sitters, and it was not dear to purchase. However, when he settled in Paris, the young artist rapidly came to the front ; he himself was wont to tell how, the demand for portraits by him becoming very great, he found the pastel a quicker means of creating them than oils would have been. Out of the mystery of his early career this significant fact remains that the first pastel by La Tour that was engraved and published was his portrait of Voltaire. The famous sketch for this, possessed by M. Strauss — one of the supreme sketches by mortal hands — is amongst the masterpieces of portraiture, an unforgettable thing ; but in it is no hint or hesitation of studentship. Old Boulogne, "first painter to the King," could have found no fault of drawing there ! The art is the art of a finished and completely arrayed master. How the young artist and the already famous writer and man of the world met, it were difficult to guess. Voltaire was in England VOLTAIRE By De La Tour in the Collection of Monsieur Emile Strauss xiv AT THE MERCY OF THE GOSSIPS 59 from 1726 to 1729, his thirty-third to his thirty-sixth years^ — La Tour's twenty-second to twenty-fifth years. Langlois' engraving bears the date 1 73 1 ; so that we may take it that Voltaire and La Tour met in the beginning of their long friendship at latest shortly after the writer's return from England. It was to be an affair of lasting moment in the young artist's life. The great ironic spirit of Voltaire had wide artistic insight, as keen and deep-searching as his knowledge of men and affairs. In his youth he had gone to Largilliere for his portrait — a picture redolent of youth and grace. In the wonderful sketch that La Tour wrought, we see Voltaire the man in the fulness of his eager thirties, stated and set down by one of the most forthright artists of the age — the radiance of youth gone, usurped by the searching glance of the wonderful eyes and the knowledge and wisdom of the sarcastic mouth ; eyes that were to see into the agony of France, and smiling lips that were to slay her ancient state — a haunting mask. In 1734 Lepicie engraved La Tour's portrait of Charles de Roddes de La Morliere, who so greatly affected the pose of the East. La Tour at thirty, then, has arrived. In 1736, as a law-deed shows, he was living with his elder brother Charles, two years his senior, in the Rue Jean-Saint-Denis, near the Oratory of the Rue Saint-Honore. It is clear that La Tour was by this time, his thirty-second year, in the vogue ; he was in a position of ease, living with that brother who had made a considerable fortune in the victualling of the French armies during the campaign in Italy, in which speculations the artist had shared. La Tour, difficult and sharp of tongue in the company of the great and the rich, showed ever towards his own kin a warm affection and a gentleness that were above all snobbery and pettiness. His social rise during his thirties was rapid, and he moved amidst a brilliant galaxy of wits and celebrities in Paris. But, many as were his faults of temper and taste, he kept such for the highly placed — his life is unblemished by a condescension or a paltriness towards his poor relations. He kept touch with them all, and denied them never. 60 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. In two wills that remain, written by him, but which were unfortun ately cancelled in his eightieth year, when his wits began to dim, by a codicil which his restless brain and hand in old age added, as his unquiet spirit added to and tampered with all that he had done in art and life, he neither forgot nor overlooked his most humble or necessitous kin — from Raphael Joret, the tailor of Beaune-en-Bour- gogne, to his little cousin Morel, whose husband was a glazier in Sceaux. We have the gossip pen-portrait by Bucelly d'Estrees, his life long friend, of La Tour as he was at this time. Short, some five feet two inches in height, of a pale complexion, of goodly shape, prompt and decided in carriage and step, he carried his head high and well — the eyes quick, lively, and full of fire ; the face oval and well shaped ; the lips thin ; in his ways and manners refined, with the neat and tidy and clean habits of the exquisite. And Jean Jacques Rousseau bears witness to his living in, and being sought after by, the highest and most cultured society of his day. D'Hallencourt de Dromesnil, Bishop of Verdun, begs as a favour to be allowed to see him at work upon the portrait of Cardinal de Tencin ; Gilbert de Montmorin Saint Herem, Bishop of Langres, asks in terms such as he would have used in .addressing a minister, what day he may call upon him. La Tour was, in fact, now moving in that brilliant artistic and literary circle of Paris such as supped once a week at the house of Madame Geoffrin in her famous salon in the Rue Saint-Honore. Here he spent much of his time when the daylight was gone — here and behind the scenes at the Opera and the theatre. At Madame Geoffrin's was a bright world, in which the women were distinguished for intellect and charm, and met the men of mark on an equal footing. La Tour, hot and eager in political debate, and given to airing philosophy with the best, does not seem always to have impressed the wits with his wisdom as much as with the coloured chalk. Montmartel is recorded by his son to have said in after years : " La Tour had enthusiasm and employed it to paint xiv AT THE MERCY OF THE GOSSIPS 61 the thinkers of his time ; the brain was a jumble of politics and morals, of which he fancied he spoke knowingly. . . . You have by him, my children, a sketch for my portrait ; it was the price for the good-nature with which I listened to him settling the destinies of Europe." Here, too, La Tour met Mariette of the note-making habits, of Abecedario fame, who was also more than a little irked by our artist's philosophic outpourings. Society in Paris was in a vague state of morals ; and the intellectuals cannot be said to have risen wholly superior to the code of their day at all points. That La Tour was a model of the proprieties no man can suggest. He moved in a world not as yet given to severe convention or primness, nor oppressed by the seventh commandment. But the intellectuals were looking at life straight and fearlessly ; and out of their survey was arising a new and virile code of conduct far removed from the mere laxity and levity of the age. The religious fanaticism of King Sun and his bigot -wife the Maintenon had gone hand in hand with sexual laxity ; and the intellectuals in questioning the corruption of the Court put the religion of the Court into the melting-pot with the thing with which it had consorted and lain down. All France was scribbling. Men were writing strange books, not wholly nice in the King's ears, but vastly entertaining to the laughing courtiers. Many things were being born besides the children of mistresses — a new art, a new literature, a new thought, a new France. What will these things do at their full increase ? Madame Geoffrin was too much of the Roman matron to fall into light flirtations ; but some of the letters between La Tour and the clever beauties whom his art immortalised prove at least a very warm Platonism, as when Madame Thelusson, no less, writes : " My husband leaves to-morrow, and you would do me a good deed, sir, in showing me the friendship of coming to dine with me." The ladies were caressing the little lion. CHAPTER XV WHEREIN GOSSIP LEADS US BEHIND THE SCENES It was at a far different house, at the home of La Poupeliniere, the famous financier at Passy, that La Tour moved in a society more attune to his tastes, and where he was more at his ease. Here would foregather the bloods who were interested in the arts, the savants such as Vaucanson, musicians Rameau and the like, artists such as Carle van Loo and his wife Catherine Somis, whose nightingale voice made beautiful the songs of Italy. These gatherings were jocund affairs where La Tour was thoroughly at home. We find the Comte d'Egmont writing to La Tour on the 30th of April 1742, asking him to go to Passy after the play at the Opera-Comique, giving him for meeting-place the theatre after the play is over. It was behind the scenes of the theatre, or rather of the opera, that, above all, La Tour found himself in pleasantest company with the dandies of the day, just as the gilded youth frequent the musical comedies of our own time. To La Tour's dangling about the side- scenes of the theatre of the eighteenth century many of the singers and players of the age owe what little of fame that remains to them, surviving their fleeting vogue in the coloured chalks of the artist's sketches that have kept their names alive. There hang, in the museum of his native town of Saint Quentin a large number of pastel sketches for portraits by La Tour which make this northern French town famous. They are the quick, forceful records of the first impressions left by his sitters upon his alert sense of vision — the vigorous studies for many of his most famous pictures. They 62 MADAME DE LA POPELINIERE By De La Tour at St. Quentin ch. xv BEHIND THE SCENES 63 used to hang on these walls in the little simple black frames wherein he had set them, which but enhanced their high achievement — the same frames that had held the delicate, fragile things upon the walls of La Tour's studio. Reverent hands and hero-worshipping have set these treasures in elaborate and handsome gold frames ; therefore one must not defile the temple of his genius with questioning criticisms — and it were in vain to do so now. . . . Here may be seen, as the searching eyes of Maurice Quentin de La Tour saw them as they lived, many of those who were making fantastic history and gay romance in the France of Louis the Fifteenth — from Louis the Well-Beloved himself to the frail beauties of the town, the toasts of lightly sinning Paris. France might hunger or thirst, her battalions be battered by shot and grenade and flung back in black defeats or march on to victories, but Paris had to have her Opera through good and evil days ; and the beauties of her Opera created as fierce enthusiasms as the triumphs by land or sea of such master-spirits as loomed in the age. Here at Saint Quentin we may see, limned by La Tour's deft chalks, the colour and form and features of them that thrilled the town, as skilfully wrought as his master-hand limned the mighty men of genius of his day. They speak to us as though they lived again, smiling out of their frames fresh as the maker created them — for 'tis the glory of the coloured chalk that its first beauty of colour remains. La Tour was the skilled character-painter of them all ; he stated the age of Louis Quinze as Clouet before him keeps alive the staid beauties and personages of Charles the Ninth's day, Holbein the age of bluff King Hal of England. The note of Louis the Well-Beloved's day was Charm ; amiability was over all, graciousness and pretty manners its breath. The majestic presence, the mythologic pomposity, the severe godlike airs and rigid dignity of Louis the Fourteenth's years are wholly flown out of France. The women have flung off with a sigh of relief the stiff brocades and august corsets of heroic pomposity ; and having learnt to step more lightly through the gallant wayfaring of the Regency, they have formed the habit of prettiness, and trifling 64 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. and airy wit is the speech of their smiling mouths, dainty elegance controls the fashioning of their gowns, and Watteau has taught them graceful forms for their adornment. This affectation of eternal gaiety the artists of the Court caught with rare and pleasant monotony. And such being the very atmosphere that they breathed, La Tour's deft sketches of the beauties hold the fragrance of it. But La Tour saw too deep, even into superficial souls, to be content with skill of hand in painting their mere fripperies of adornment, their powder and paint and patches and smile — he painted the frippery of their character. Yet his searching ken sees deeper here and there than his frail model thought, and behind the pose of trivial charm we may see a haunt ing hint of sadness and disillusion even whilst the lips smile their set smile. As he chose, in an elaborate age when Boucher was lord of elaborate taste, to set his masterpieces in simple black frames, so also he set himself to limn the character of such as sat to him — not their adornments and affectations — and he did the wondrous thing with consummate tact and rare skill of hand and vigorous purpose. In nothing is his art more significant than in these pastel studies for his portraits, where we find him concerned solely with the character of the features, indeed often nothing but the features, not only the draperies and fal-lals being wholly lacking, but the very adornment of the hair left out ; the selected and only necessary part of a portrait reduced to its uttermost simplicity, without enhancement of those very things that to the portrait-painters of his day, and of their sitters, were their chief source of pride — the powdered hair, the furbelows and frills and ribbons and lace and jewelries that were set upon the fair beauty to enhance her superficial charms. For La Tour the play was the thing, For him the subtleties of individual character, the carriage of the head, the tell-tale glance of the eye, the betrayal of the lip, the spirit behind the mask of the face, were the difficulties to be overcome, the essentials of the thing to be portrayed. He caught the natural swing of the body, the unconsidered pose, the unrehearsed effect. No artist's skill ever caught with surer touch the IX MADEMOISELLE PUVIGNY BY LA TOUR {At St. Quentin) XV BEHIND THE SCENES 65 glance of the eyes and the movement of the lips than did the art of Maurice Quentin de La Tour. Rich gold frames now adorn the pastel sketches at Saint Quentin ; but whose skill of hand shall further enrich the skill of him who drew the master-work within their borders ? That several of the women whose faces smile upon us from the frames of the museum at Saint Quentin were not of the stuff that makes a great people, is sure — several were but the frail favourites of the Opera ; and the Opera did not live upon the austerities nor pose for the virtues. Here we may look upon the faces of such as were the toasts amongst the bloods and dandies who frequented the theatre, as though they lived to-day : Mademoiselle Clairon ; Mademoiselle Dangeville ; the famous actress Madame Favart, who fired the heart of the great Marechal Saxe ; Mademoiselle Silvia ; the celebrated dancer Mademoiselle Camargo, of whom more anon, she who defied the slanderous tongue of romance and came through the hot-house air of the dancing-woman's life unspotted ; her dancing father, of the noble blood of Italy, Cupis, is also there ; and the delicate blossom-like features of the pretty dancer Mademoiselle Puvigny (Puvigne), of the Opera, who was the rage of Paris, like most of these ; Mademoiselle le Maure also, and Mademoiselle Arnauld — their dancing and their sing ing done. And of the players who amused the town, Jean Monet, Tomasso Vizentini the Harlequin, and Manelli, whose very pictured being sets the eyes laughing — these men are there also, amongst the dainty women. But above all, there haunts one a beautiful face that smiles out upon us, the long oval face of the singer Marie Fel, who was not only the rage of Paris, but who was at last to turn La Tour's gadding love into a long romance, keeping it from the time she came into his life to the end of his days. When she joined her life to his, and became his mistress, can but be guessed at ; but she won him body and soul. She burst upon the town in La Tour's thirtieth year, a beautiful girl of twenty-one. She must very early have come into his life, as the winsome sketch of her abundantly proves. But Mademoiselle K 66 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. Fel we shall meet again. Of the large genial features of the smiling Bo'e'te de Saint-Leger we know little more than this presentment of La Tour's skill reveals to us, except that she lived to hear of the horrors of the Revolution, for she was living hard by Saint Quentin in the February of 1793, the awful year of the Terror. And those several handsome faces of the Unknown — who were they ? There are faces there of such whose strut was not in the limelight of popular favour, their names lost in a more honourable neglect, whose lives were passed in less dangerous privacy, and of whom we would gladly know more. They compel us to wonder who they were, these silent Unknowns, with their so different wist ful airs — some smiling and gay and bright, distinguished of manner ; some tender, some mischievous ; all live again, whether beauties of the theatre, women of the Court, whether aristocrat or of the burgess class of this Paris of the mid-seventeen-hundreds. What tragedy or comedy was theirs ? How did they live their little day ? — whether they lived a giddy life or knew little of romance, all record of them is gone, even though they lived little more than a hundred years ago — their place and all they did, vanished into oblivion. Yet they look a goodly company of bright and witty ladies. La Tour cared neither for such as had rank or wealth or power when he stood before his easel and stripped off his coat to his work. From the moment he took up the tools of his craft in his sensitive fingers he was an artist, careless of all else but the recording of the thing seen, as he saw and felt it to be. As long as he painted, his sitter was his model ; and he lorded it over that model until he had created therefrom a work of art, whether the sitter were of the blood royal or of the gutter. His sympathy with the philosophic movement of his age left him scant respect for the great or the wealthy ; but women always interested him — above all, the women of the theatre. Indeed, we have seen him, when not in the circle that Madame Geoffrin drew about her, living his evenings, when work was done at the playhouse ; and to the people of the theatre he showed a gracious side of his character that he hid behind brusqueries in the presence of ,«/: xv BEHIND THE SCENES 67 the highly placed. He limned these butterfly folk with the skill that he showed in the presentment of all ranks and grades, steeped in the atmosphere in which they lived — just as you shall never mistake in his handiwork a prince of the blood for a city merchant, an artist for a farmer-general, a queen for a singer. CHAPTER XVI WHEREIN WE STEP AWHILE INTO MORE OR LESS GODLY COMPANY La Tour not only found himself welcomed thus keenly to the houses of the blue-stockings at Madame Geoffrin's and at the merry assemblies and routs of the artistic and singing folk ; greeted as amicably in the wings of the theatre and the opera-house ; but he was much in the company of the genial brotherhood of priests — those men of the world who wore the black coat and neck-bands of the Church as a disguise to win a living, but were employing their wit and talents in the worldly atmosphere of Court intrigue, of pleasure and gay living, and of more questionable pursuits, the men who won the nickname of the abbes de cour. These cultured men, rudely shaken in their allegiance to their Church by the petty persecutions of their overlords, and the worship of dogma at the expense of humanity, not only gave themselves to the literary and artistic taste of their day, but many of them were deeply bitten with the new thought that was shaking their Church to its very foundations. They were wits, critics of art and literature and life, men of the world. Many of them still held some vague loyalty to their religion, even whilst they broke nearly every commandment in its code. Some were content to lead light lives ; others steeped themselves in the humanising ideas that were about to change the face of France and of the world. Amongst them moved La Tour with easy grace, at home in their genial and cultured atmosphere. He drew more than a few of the epicurean brotherhood in coloured chalks with wondrous skill and shows them priests in their black coats and collar-bands, but men of 68 L'ABBE HUBERT By De La Tour at St. Quentin ch.xvi GODLY COMPANY 69 humorous converse rather than preachers of the austerities. From the walls of Saint Quentin there look down upon us several of the goodly company. The Abbe Huber is there, reading by the light of two candles — his a far from ascetic face. He was La Tour's life long friend, and, so gossip has it, boon-companion in his dissipations. He is shown, by a sly jest of the artist's, so absorbed in his reading that one of the candles gutters to its socket whilst he reads on, unconscious of the gathering gloom and untroubled by the noisome stench of smouldering tallow. That the genial priest took the jest in right good part is proved by the life-long friendship of the two men — indeed, the Abbe left La Tour a legacy in his will when he died. La Tour himself always treasured the memory of this portrait — it appears in the background of the engraving from his own portrait, L' Auteur qui Rit, that was one of his two contributions to the great Salon of 1737 when it opened its doors again to the public after the long years since La Tour's birth. And Chardin, no mean judge, was wont to dwell on the power with which the pastellist had rendered the still-life of the picture. Of a truth, the godly man is not lacking in the signs of a sensual personality, even as he sits discovered in the habit of the student ; — student and learned he was, if scarce the pale lean student who burns the midnight oil. This picture kept its maker's and its sitter's affection to the end. The Abbe le Blanc is there also, his chubby youthful face held by a restrained smile — that Abbe le Blanc who was the hot champion in the Press of the artists, La Tour and Boucher not least of all, against all attacks. The Abbe Soulavie has disappeared, rough hands having destroyed the pastel of him during the Terror. But the Abbe Pommy er remains ; and the wrinkled, humorous old face of the Pere Emmanuel, withered as an old russet-apple, the sly old eyes and puckered mouth set to hide the demure smile that will peep out from the monk's hood — in him we have La Tour's father confessor, who hints to us of penances inflicted not uneasy to be borne. 'Tis a thousand pities that others of this brotherhood who were 70 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xvi to win to wide repute, were never immortalised by La Tour's searching chalks — that Italian Abbe Galiani, let us say, who glittered in the Salons of the great women of the day, and was the brightest companion of the philosophers, whom his witty if garrulous tongue so often challenged in duel. But La Tour drew the heads of the Abbe Regley, the Abbe Nollet, the Abbe Lattaignant, and last, but not least, the Abbe Raynal of the sharp and incisive pen, which was to lead men's eyes to the great awakening, and thus to make some mark in history. They were perhaps the strangest part of that strange age — the supreme paradox of its vast paradox — these priests whose several features the pastels of La Tour drew with such consummate skill and insight. These have dined at his table, be you sure, as he at theirs — have sat and gossiped in his studio, of the world and of the flesh and of the devil, painting the lord of darkness not too black ; they have laughed and jested with Maurice Quentin de La Tour, not above a risky story or a naughty scandal, ready to dispute a theory in geology or the sciences, or whether the earth has been under water ; ready to cackle of medical things, or cures or quackeries or maladies or ills, or to question the law or speculate on immortality or the lack of immortality ; ready with elaborate schemes to recreate the world in more orderly fashion than the bungle which their eyes looked upon it to be. L'ABBE POMMYER By De La Tour at St. Quentin CHAPTER XVII WHICH HAS TO DO WITH VIRTUE AND BIGOTRY Cardinal Fleury's skill in matters politic failed him in the business of his religion. Rabid and superstitious quarrels of the Church sullied the great Cardinal's reign — old Fleury having more than a spice of theologic bigotry in him, though he poured much oil on the troubled waters. The Bishop of Senez, for opposition to the bull " Unigenitus," had been banished, and the middle classes of France eagerly sided with the Jansenists. In 1730 Louis fell foul of the Parliament over the business, which straightway took to affirming the independence of the temporal power, and there followed banishments of magistrates and the Parliament men. The Government was now thoroughly at loggerheads with the popular party ; the Court party as rabidly Jesuitical as the Parliament men were rabidly Jansenist ; and it was in 1732 that, the Jansenists claiming miracles in the churchyard of St. Medard, a grim humorist wrote upon the gates, shut by order of Fleury, the memorable waggery : " By order of the King, it is forbidden to God to do miracles in this place." Also abroad, the old Cardinal's good angel deserted him for a little while. In spite of all his efforts, France was dragged into war in 1733, and in the following year lost her great commander, the Duke of Berwick, killed by a cannon-ball in the trenches before Philipsburg ; within a week the victorious and brave Villars, who at eighty- two fought his wars with the energy and ardour of his youth, fell ill from fatigue that would have killed most men, and died at Turin. 7i 72 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. The Peace of Vienna followed in the October of 1735 ; the short war had been waged by France with honour and profit, and peace rested upon the land for several years. But even worthy Fleury's pious belief in his young King being the Lord's Anointed was beginning to need some nursing. For, truth to tell, Louis the Fifteenth was soon giving his poor Queen more than qualms of neglect ; the adulterous blood of his great grandfather was soon to send him tripping into riots that are un clean reading. In him, as in King Sun, was the same intense piety wedded to the same profligate and extravagant disregard of every shred of decency and honour. Amidst the France that shook off the pompous mock-heroic pose of the sixteen-hundreds at the Regent's coming to power, there was one small Court that kept its religion a sincerity, its life a dignity — the Court of the Polish royal house of Lorraine. It has been said that in Lorraine alone, of all France, " passion went still to passion's extreme — love remained a generous illusion, devotion knew no fears or shrinkings, even to the point, if need be, of suicide." From this Court came Marie Leczinska to be Queen over France, carrying the death's-head, which she called her " gentille mignonne," with her in her little oratory, as she took it on her every journey, though she " lacked almost a shift." But from the gloom of her religion she was saved by her good nature, her gay qualities of heart and head, by a laughing charity, a serene conscience — as is betrayed by the homely mischief of her smile. Unfortunately, except amongst her very intimates, her good qualities were hidden under shyness — and her young husband was never one of her intimates ; these were a small and loyal circle, apart from the vicious and insincere Court that held Versailles. Unfitted to glitter amongst the wits, repelled by their life as they by her shynesses, she had soon withdrawn herself into a little circle of elderly and honourable men and women, where tranquillity reigned, and simple converse of hushed voices made a drowsy life that brought out X MARIE LECZINSKA nous BY LA TOUR : • ' ):'< -M {Louvre) xvn VIRTUE AND BIGOTRY 73 all that was best in her : here she was content to paint bad pictures, play a little music indifferent well, arrange her charities — an old woman before she was young. The real woman the young King never knew. He paid her his formal devotion in the beginning — or what he thought to be she. But he only saw a poor and hesitating German Princess, awed in the presence of a King of France. He only saw her an obedient and dutiful wife, without the caresses and coquetries of her sex, shrinking into a dull corner of the Palace, where were hushed voices of old people and " no young thing laughed." So the lad grew to manhood — a strange figure for France, and a baffling problem. This handsome young King, whom nothing amused, nothing interested, even the old Cardinal de Fleury could not gauge ; yet he tried all his skill without being able to lead him to employ his time on any single interest, or to lead his affection to any single companion — found him indifferent, whether to affairs of State or the culture of lettuces. At the dawn of his manhood and his reign over the mightiest realm of the world, he stood " devoured with weariness . . . satiated with glory before he had tasted it, weary of power before he had enjoyed it." Withal he has one belief — he believes in Hell. Amidst his boredoms he is torn with terrors of death, with fears of eternal damnation, which keep him for days in melancholy, out of which the excitement of the hunt and the drinking-bout alone can rouse him. He lives his day remote from his people and his high calling, in the smallest rooms of his Palace, those "Little Apartments" that he has arranged for his private life. He shows scant interest in the great men of his day, or in great affairs of State — the old Cardinal finds him only showing fire, the fire of jealousy, as to the list of the guests whom he wishes commanded to his supper-parties therein ! He has considerable good sense, but is without any pity — his tongue sarcastic, his outlook on life dry and malicious. Behind all, an almost violent need for pleasure. To this L 74 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. hesitant, embarrassed will the domination of a passionate, lively, witty, clever woman was a necessity. Marie Leczinska, alas ! was not that necessity. It came that he passed his nights in the bright companionship of gay young bloods, the Dukes de la Tremouille, de Gesvres, d'Epernon, de Richelieu and their like, and of gay young women of the old noblesse, such as the gamine Princess of the great house of Conde, Mademoiselle de Charolois, brought about him with all her witty impudence tickling his jaded ears to mirth. The Comtesse de Toulouse also set aside her aristocratic puritanism to try and win the young King. From the sirens he shrank even whilst he enjoyed their society — the old Cardinal's tales of the women of the Regency had bitten deep into the young King's fears. Meantime the King and Queen cooled further from each other. Their seven children drew them no nearer. The Court, from courtier-duke to the lackeys of the back-stairs, saw in a mistress to the King the end of the old Cardinal's influence and economies ; saw the chance of the direction of the King's will ; even the Cardinal did not wholly dread it, so long as she should be a creature not opposed to him. Out of the wish, desire grew. In 1733, in the King's twenty-third year, rumour got abroad that the King had found a lover. At last, one night at supper at La Muette, the King, having drunk to the health of the Unknown Fair, broke his glass, and all broke their glasses after him. There were many guesses ; but only a few noticed that, when the name of Madame de Mailly was mentioned, the King blushed. Amidst all the mystery, the King flung aside melancholy, became young again, was as one glad to be alive, showed himself everywhere, and astonished every one with his vivacity and gaiety — or flung himself into the mad merriment of supper-parties, leading the noisy revelry far into the night. He would appear before the Queen thereafter reeking of champagne ; and she, protesting, would pray for him until he fell asleep. At last a night came that she refused him her room. The courtiers played the following night xvii VIRTUE AND BIGOTRY 75 their daring stroke — as a dainty figure glided stealthily to the King's Little Apartments, her hood was flung back, and they that stood near saw that it was Madame de Mailly. The news flew through Versailles. The King had taken a mistress from the old noblesse of France. Madame de Mailly was the eldest of the five daughters of the Marquis de Nesle, and of his wife Armand Felice de la Porte- Mazarin, daughter of the Due de Rethel-Mazarin. The Marquis de Nesle was a spendthrift and boon-companion of buffoons, ever in debt and hiding from his creditors — a cynic and a wit who ever showed a brave face to scandal and a calm insolence even in his ruin, he who was guilty of the haughty tomfoolery when ruined by " mere tradesmen " of Paris of writing of his " wretched suit against his wretched creditors." Madame de Mailly's husband, also her cousin, came of an old and illustrious family of soldiers, but he was a foolish and vain fellow. She roused the King to merriment and gaiety awhile ; grew to love him, and well-nigh to worship him. She was to have a bitter awakening, to find him pitiless enough. But whilst the glamour lasted, she danced to a lively measure. The King embarked on a perpetual orgy of suppers and wild carouses. At least she awoke him from his boredom and his torpor. CHAPTER XVIII WHEREIN MAURICE QUENTIN DE LA TOUR IS ELECTED TO THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS That was a strange and paradoxical age that saw Louis the Fifteenth King over France. Men judge an age as they judge their fellows, by a tag — as though judgment lay in the need for a curt phrase, short enough to scribble upon a label. We are taught to dismiss the people who walked the years of Louis the Well-Beloved with a shrug of the shoulder as a light and superficial folk, intent only on a frivolous wayfaring ; as though the times had produced but the risky volume of Bijoux Indiscrets, forgetting that it gave forth also the Nouvelle Heloise ! we are made to think that the women were light-o'-love and lived on flippancy and caprice, yet gave birth to the great women and men of the Revolution ! that the writers were but frivolous spirits who wrote questionable verse in rosy ink ; that art was a trivial playing which concerned itself solely with prettiness and the indecencies or trivial things. Nay, has not its " philosophy " been bitterly defined as being " without wisdom " ? 'Tis true enough that philosophy walked through the seventeen-hundreds not without folly, yet wisdom did not wholly flee from it. True it is that the mode of the great was to dance to lively airs down the pleasant and sunny side of the highway of life ; the fashion was that every blood who could string a sentence together should write verse with prettily coloured inks, and, if occasion rose, should step on to his chair and play the fantastic orator — as the superior young man spouts his inane fatuities to-day; but these were the superficial essay to play in flippant manner 76 XI M. PAJOU BY LA TOUR '¦'¦ {Louvre) I I ch. xviii LA TOUR ELECTED TO ACADEMY 77 the part of bigger and sterner folk, who were writing and speaking with no foolish pen or tongue. France knew wisdom, nevertheless, and her eyes saw deeper than most — the real France ; Diderot and D'Alembert, Rousseau and Voltaire, Condorcet and Helvetius and Raynal, and noble-hearted Turgot and D'Holbach, were also the children of the age ; and La Tour and Chardin did not utter their life-work in vain. All France was not a debauch of flippancy ; n'or did the whole people dance unthinking to sprightly measures. Deep down was being born and living and striving and suffering a new France, that was to shake the world and stand astride all Europe like a Colossus. And even the gay France that stepped it lightly to its doom, surely it did not live wholly in vain ! Graciousness, at least, was hers, and charm and elegance not wholly to be set aside. That black bigotry of cruelty and intolerance that was the curse and habit of religion lost much of its foul garb. Shallow minds, and minds that have no excuse of shallowness, condemn the art of Boucher that smiles out of the age in genial radiance, unable to see that in him was given to France one of the greatest decorative painters of all time. Self-sufficient and narrow souls poured their bitter ignorance upon him and upon La Tour alike, so wholly different in their art and achievement, unable to see that the art of La Tour stated all that was real and true and noble in the sphere of art. But the prigs were not as yet. The sun was shining on Boucher and on La Tour alike in these the strenuous years of their twenties and early thirties. La Tour does not lack sitters. But his name is not yet known to the public, largely in that he has not yet received the State recognition, without which it was in his day impossible to win to fame. However, he was not long to remain without public honours. On the 25th of May 1737 he presented himself for election to the Royal Academy, and was admitted as agree, its first degree — or, as we should say, Associate — and on the ist of June 78 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xviii was called upon to do the portraits of the painters, Restout and Lemoyne (Boucher's old master), as his " pieces-de-reception." On the 4th of June, three days afterwards, came the awful news that Francois Lemoyne, overstrained with work upon his famous ceilings at Versailles, had taken his own life. The Academy thereupon asked La Tour for the portrait of J. B. van Loo instead of that of the dead man ; but La Tour never completed it, and in its place was accepted that of Dumont le Romain, which, with the portrait of Restout, still hangs in the Louvre. In this year of 1737 Voltaire was praying La Tour to retouch two copies of his portrait. But there was about to happen in 1737 that which was to have a large effect upon the career of La Tour, nay, upon the art of all France. The first Salon of Louis the Fifteenth was to open its doors to the public — for the first time for thirty-three years. XII THE DAUPHIN AS A CHILD BY LA TOUR {Louvre) CHAPTER XIX WHEREIN THE NEW ART IS REVEALED ENTHRONED IN THE ANCIENT PALACE OF THE KINGS OF FRANCE It was on the 1 8th of August 1737 that the doors of the Salon were thrown open to the public in the old Palace of the Louvre for the first time in Louis the Fifteenth's reign. This Salon of 1737 was an artistic event for all France — a new thing for the new generation that France had brought forth. Old Rigaud, shuffling along under the weight of his eighty years through the great rooms at the Louvre, might well blink from under his huge peruke, of a now ancient fashion, at the distance travelled by French art since the beginning of the century, as he held forth, not without irony and some sadness, to the younger Academicians, Boucher, La Tour, Chardin and the rest, concerning the last Salon of 1704, thirty-three years gone by. Here had hung his great portrait of the Grand Monarque, there his portrait of another, and so on, all painted in the grand manner. Rigaud remembered that Rigaud had been the hero of the splendid business. Blink now he well might, for not only the place of honour for Rigaud, but the whole art he knew, had vanished — the old Court painter stood lost, stammering and bewildered, in a new world. A new generation had been born, grown up, and was in possession ! Taste was wholly changed. The grand manner, the stately mock-heroics, the solemn pomposities that had built up the majesty of the France of Louis Quatorze were flown, and the agreeable, elegant, and pleasant make-believe of Louis Quinze reigned in their 79 80 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. stead. The art of Le Brun had been usurped by the art of Boucher. France had become a coquette, seeking pretty flower- strewn ways to tread, and giving herself to dalliance — her patch- box, her rouge-pot, and her fan a serious part of her unseriousness : her manhood's aim now to be a pretty fellow. Boucher has created the new style — the Pastoral, the Cupid- piece, and the Venus-piece. His true province was that of a great decorative painter, and he has come into his kingdom. At what time La Tour came into Boucher's life is not known, but in this, the year that La Tour was elected to the Academy, their friendship was close and intimate, and La Tour sent as one of his two pastels to the Salon a portrait of Boucher's pretty wife, Madame Boucher, that was greatly to increase his fame, and noise it abroad, together with a portrait of himself, now hanging at the Louvre, the L'Auteur qui Rit. La Tour, taking advantage of his right to exhibit at the Salon-due to his election earlier in the year, sent these two pastels : they were placed on the right of the stair, not in the Salon itself ; and, catching the eyes of those who thronged to the great opening, they attracted much notice, calling forth the admiration of all beholders. They were the first pastels ever shown by him in public. During the seventeen years since Rosalba Carriera had brought the coloured chalks into France, La Tour's art, ripened by study and skilled by practice, had arrived at a height of achievement which at one stroke proved him to be the greatest living master of pastel in all France — as he remains the greatest master. It was a revelation. The mere prettinesses of the Venetian artist's skill of hand and vision are gone from the exquisite medium ; and large and virile qualities are discovered. There had arisen about La Tour a school of pastellists — Perronneau ; Liotard de Geneve ; the Swede Lundberg, whose portrait of Boucher was his election piece-de-reception into the Academy ; Le Chalier and others. Painters so world-famed as Chardin and Boucher, and after them Fragonard, turned to it by their friend and comrade La Tour, seriously employed the coloured chalks ("coloured dust"). xix THE NEW ART IS REVEALED 81 Ducreux, Drouais, Madame Roslin, Madame Guyard, all went to La Tour for instruction ; and later Prudhon and Madame Vigee le Brun owed tribute to him. During the thirty-seven years that followed, up to 1773, La Tour sent to the succeeding Salons some hundred and fifty portraits in pastel. These portraits, a splendid achievement in the domain of artistry, are all the more interesting in that they limn the features of many of the most celebrated people of the reign, from the King to the latest dancer at the Opera ; they give us a gallery of the witty and the serious, the dandified and the brilliant, the flighty and the fashionable folk who trod the boards of the tragi-comedy that made the day of Louis the Fifteenth's France. He struck from the first a note different from his fellows. The artists of the time had not taken the modern pose of Art ; they painted, within the limits of convention, the picture and the portrait as an affair that had a settled part in the scheme of decora tion of a room — and they did it wondrous well and not wholly unwisely. La Tour and Chardin came to the handsome business with eyes and minds wholly free from the passing convention and vogue of elegance ; they saw Life with frank vision and not as they were told to see it ; and they recorded their vision and wrought their art with a directness and an individual statement that thrust their achievement amongst the immortal things made by man's hands. Their art and their craftsmanship, like the art and the craftsmanship of Frans Hals, stand out to-day as modern and as truthful as though they had been done but yesterday. In computing their significance and accomplishment we are unembarrassed by any need to qualify its technical excellence by making allowance for the age in which it was uttered. We have nothing to explain, as in the art even of Watteau or Boucher or Fragonard — no qualifications of time or mode or necessity. For, mark you well, La Tour does not stand for trial amidst a mob of mediocre artists — only men of mark in their art could become Academicians ; and only Academicians could exhibit at the Salons. M 82 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. And what a galaxy of genius glittered there ! Chardin, Boucher, Greuze, and the like. He stood amongst the aristocracy of talent ; and he could hold his head high amongst the greatest of them. Diderot, lovable, wayward, didactic, the leading spirit of the Encyclopedists ; Grimm, just and of well-balanced mind and habits, writer of the Literary Correspondence, that will live into the years, — both these men were bringing to the criticism of men and affairs a new spirit, a new point of view, a new standard of rightness ; both were applying to all the human activities the laws of the new philosophy ; and both, in the doing, were compelling the ideals of that philosophy upon Art. They strained the functions of Art to the breaking-point — as did Ruskin a hundred years after them. Neither understood the real significance of Art nor its essence. They invented for Art a function and an aim that are outside Art — or, perhaps it were better said, that may or may not be in Art but is not Art's essential. With all their genius, as afterwards Ruskin misapplied his genius in blundering essays to bind Art within terms of the moralities and of political economy, and as Whistler blundered when, pen in hand, by essaying to prove that Art was for Craft's sake, so Diderot and Grimm came like them to writing, with force and wondrously misapplied skill of expression, some of the most astounding and splendid trash that has ever been written, even in the stew of its strange cookery, in the well- intentioned thing called Art Criticism. Yet Diderot and Grimm, hopelessly as they slandered and misunderstood the high artistic achievement of Boucher, could not pass by or condemn the genius of La Tour. Both men treated his art with profound respect. And therein lies a new significance of the age. Boucher was mouthing the speech and thoughts of conventional eighteenth-century France ; La Tour and Chardin were stating the truth and love of truth that lay deep down in the real France — a France not yet wholly giving bay to that which its sullen eyes but dared to glower at, except through its thinkers and artists. Critics, friendly or not so friendly, always speak of La Tour's " life-like likenesses " ; his pastels bring honour to every Salon. xix THE NEW ART IS REVEALED 83 The demand for portraits by him became an eager desire amongst the celebrities of the day ; the highest-placed at the Court were soon intriguing to get him to paint them — to find that it needed a diplomacy almost as intricate as the making of a treaty. To this first Salon of Louis the Fifteenth's France in 1737 Chardin also sent several works, and greatly added to his fame as a painter of domestic subjects and of still-life. CHAPTER XX OF A DUEL WHEREIN A CONVENT-BRED GIRL OVERTHROWS THE WOMAN OF THE WORLD, BUT THE PRIZE OF BEAUTY IS SNATCHED BY THE YOUNGEST SISTER La Tour followed up his success of 1737 by sending to the Salon the following year (1738) the portraits of Restout, the Academician ; Mansard (Mansart de Levy, Comte de Sargonne), the architect to the King ; Mademoiselle Solare de la Boissiere at a window, with her hands in a muff; Madame Restout ; and a Madame de (Madame Rouille de l'Etang), meditating, book in hand. It was in praise of this Restout that the Abbe le Blanc, champion of the artists, took up the cudgels against Lafont de Saint-Yenne, a cantankerous and trenchant critic of the painters of his day. In 1739 La Tour sent to the Salon his M. Du Pouche, leaning on a chair, the forgotten painter who is said by La Tour's brother to have nursed the artist's career, and to have taught him to draw ; Le Frere Fiacre de Nazareth ; and M. de Fontpertuis (Fonspertuis ?), the parlia mentarian. We have also the testimony ofthe Due de Luynes, on the 23rd of the December of this year, that La Tour painted the King's mistress-, Madame de Mailly — for she " tells him that morning that he is the sixteenth painter who has made her portrait — one named La Tour." In that portrait was a sad end to the desire for portraits of the beauty by the King. Poor Madame de Mailly was to complain no more of the number of painters to whom she had to sit to please the King's Majesty. In 1737, when the Salon opened its doors again to the Art of 84 XIII COMTESSE D'ORSAY BY BOZE {Louvre) ch. xx THE WOMAN OF THE WORLD 85 France, Madame de Mailly was a woman of thirty. The woman's conquest of the King by her pretty ways was to be a tragi-comedy for this beautiful daughter of a noble house. The woman's generous nature, innate nobility of character, and loyalty, ill-fitted her for her questionable position — and most of all for the love of a man who had no shred of loyalty towards his people, his country, his throne, or to himself. The flagrant and insolently shameless conduct of her father and husband were not able to rob her of her loyalty to the one and protection of the other ; but they galled and embarrassed the King. Worst of all, the woman had grown to love the man. She grew jealous of him. Quarrels and bickerings began. The portrait of her by La Tour was the last compliment the King paid her in such kind. She was to be ousted out of the favour of the King by one she least thought of — her calculating sister Felicite de Nesle ; indeed, was already by two or three months so ousted, had she but faced the fact. This gaunt but strong-willed and able girl had decided in the convent to win the King. She employed her elder sister to get her to the Court. Unsuspected by the courtier crew, who laughed at her awkwardnesses, she was soon in complete possession of the King's will — she made herself by wit and address a necessity to the man's freedom from boredom. On the 28th of September in 1739, the King ordered her marriage with a complacent courtier, the Marquis de Vintimille ; and forthwith she became the King's acknowledged mistress. She kept her sister Madame de Mailly beside her ; launched into politics, carrying her discarded sister with her ; and vigorously supported the war party opposed to the great Cardinal de Fleury, and of which the two brothers De Belle-Isle were the leaders — the Due de Belle-Isle and his younger brother, the Chevalier de Belle-Isle, who henceforth grew to vast power and fortune. The two brothers decided on the dis memberment of Austria, then ruled by a woman ; they infected the two De Nesle sisters with their plans ; the Cardinal de Fleury saw himself overpowered by the strength of his adversaries and surrendered. Belle -Isle took an army eastward ; but Fleury saw to it that he had but 40,000 men instead of the 150,000 he asked for — from 86 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. the disaster of Prague ; but 8000 Frenchmen recrossed into France again. From the Princesse de Conti the King bought Choisy for the Vintimille — the first of that circle of hunting-lodges which he pur chased round Paris and Versailles to which to retire with his mistresses, mansions decorated with rare works of art and furniture, where he lived the life of a country gentleman and put off as much as might be the state of kingship, the women of the Court living thereat free from all restraint ; though the King, when he did not hunt, always attended mass at midday. Here the Vintimille bore the King a son, on whom he lavished an affection he never showed to his Queen's children. Here, in December, the Vintimille was taken suddenly ill, to the King's terrible grief, and died in the most awful agony, vowing that she had been poisoned, dying in her confessor's arms before the doctors could reach her ; that confessor also, going straightway to her sister Madame de Mailly 's room to convey her dead sister's urgent last message to her, fell dead with the message unspoken as he entered the De Mailly's door. The King turned again in his grief to Madame de Mailly. He plunged himself into a long torment of religious dread and fear. After a while boredom again took possession of him ; into this boredom came a young courtier whose wit and reckless talk concealed the crafty cunning of the man — the young Due de Richelieu joined the little suppers in the Little Apartments. Richelieu, in league with the ambitious Madame de Tencin, decided to win the King with a young widow of the house of De Nesle, a superb beauty of the Court, no other than Madame de la Tournelle, sister of the De Mailly and of the Vintimille, whose patrician beauty Nattier immortalised in his " Daybreak." Now Marie-Anne de Nesle, Marquise de la Tournelle, youngest ofthe five sisters De Nesle, was ofthe Queen's party against the King, as was Richelieu — therefore the tool of the bitter " Queen's faction " against De Fleury and his lieutenant Maurepas. Under Richelieu's guidance she fought Fleury and the unscrupulous and treacherous xx THE WOMAN OF THE WORLD 87 Maurepas for power ; and in the November of 1 742 the King blurted out to the weeping De Mailly that he loved her sister, De la Tournelle. This youngest of the five sisters De Nesle was of very different stuff from the De Mailly. Heartless, cold, firm-willed, calculating, of great beauty, she deliberately calculated her fall. She determined that there should be no secrecy or pretence of secrecy — she must be the acknowledged mistress, with the state of the King's mistress, and the expenditure and surroundings of a Queen ; for her were to be no clandestine living in secret rooms, but a palace in which she could receive the King openly ; power to draw monies from the royal treasuries ; and, before the year was out, her patent of Duchess supported by Parliament, and her children, if any, declared legitimate. Maurepas fought her for power with every weapon. He, the King's Minister, launched upon the streets of Paris the witty ribald songs that brought into the people's contempt the name of De Nesle. But the woman won. On the 21st of October 1743 she received her patent of Duchess ; and Maurepas had to draw up the deed that created her Duchesse de Chateauroux. Almost immediately her uncle, the Due de Richelieu, was appointed first gentleman of the chamber to the King, a high office, that raised him to the front rank. At once this gifted and vicious man stepped from amongst the ranks of the effeminate and vicious young dandies whom the egregious Due de Gesvres led, putting rouge upon their faces, spending half their days in bed, fluttering fans in their jewelled fingers. Richelieu stepped forth and grasped at fortune and power. Secret and alert under his outer habit of cynical frivolity and pleasure- worship, he brought a dry heart, a shameless will, a deep, calm, and unostentatious French courage, and an insolent confidence to the pursuit of his ambition. If his genius were contemptible, it was at least genius. A conqueror of women, he used their wide knowledge of the secrets of every faction to the furtherance of his consummate gift for intrigue. 88 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. Richelieu's brain was the marvellous woman Madame de Tencin. This able woman, sharing the public opinion in its disgust of the King's indifference to affairs of State, put into Richelieu's head the plan of firing the Chateauroux to rouse the King from his sluggardry, and become a King in act. Their whispers fell into the ears of a woman ripe to hear them. The Chateauroux set herself to stir the King's will, to rouse him to a sense of kingship, to silence the mocking songs of the street, to goad him to war and to take his place at the head of the army. Old Cardinal Fleury dead, the French armies flung back from Austria — what remained of them — it was in this his thirty-third year (1743) that Louis Quinze, acting upon an impulse to be like his great grandfather, the Grand Monarque, became King by act. His sluggish will and indolent habits stirred by the Chateauroux's exhortations and constant address to that end, he roused and essayed to play the King and put himself at the head of the State. But he cast himself for an important part in the drama of France for which he had small genius. He was tossed about between his minister Maurepas, whose enemy Richelieu was the King's boon-companion, and other vile, quarrelling, jealous and greedy rogues. He fell into the habit, henceforth, of ruling France from behind petticoats. The Chateauroux held his will. Shamed by the French defeat at Dettingen, she roused him to martial ambition — thundering the glory of Louis the Great in his ears. The crafty eyes of Maurepas glittered at the news. He saw that it must separate the King from his mistress ! His time was come. On the eve of the King's departure for the seat of war, Maurepas threw off the mask, and showed Louis that if he wished to play the King in such fashion as to win back the army and the people he could not take the Chateauroux with him. Amidst tears, on the 2nd of May 1744, the King left Paris to place himself at the head of the army. And no woman went with him. All France burst into praise. The troops were elated. " Have we, at last, found a king ? " The mighty question rang exultant over the land. XIV portrait of a girl ARTIST UNKNOWN {Louvre) xx THE WOMAN OF THE WORLD 89 Suddenly the army grows silent, blushes, titters, breaks into sly song. There is laughter in Flanders. Disgust, then indignation, is in all France. At Lille, houses are being arranged with a covered way into the citadel ; for Madame de Chateauroux has joined the King at Lille. So Louis strutted it through Flanders as conqueror — thence had to hurry on a sudden to Metz, the Chateauroux with him. Here, in August, he was taken ill of the small-pox. The old terror of death seized the King. The Queen's party forces a confessor upon the King, and the Chateauroux is sent packing. She reaches Paris with difficulty, shrinking back in her carriage at every posting-place whilst the horses are being changed, for fear the angry populace may discover her. The King did not die. The moment he began to recover Richelieu poured into his ear the suspicion of the eagerness of the Queen's party to see him confess — they had wished his death. Forthwith, Louis' one aim was to get back to Paris to the Chateauroux. He was bored without her ; bored with war. As soon as Fribourg fell to its siege, Louis turned towards Paris. He entered Paris acclaimed by the people, amidst great rejoicings, and christened " The Well- Beloved." The Chateauroux made the King come to her in person ; insisted on being received back in state, and that Maurepas in person should recall her. Maurepas was sent ; but immediately after Maurepas left her room she was seized with sudden illness ; and for days lay dying in terrible agony, shrieking that Maurepas had poisoned her. She died on the 8th of December, at five in the morning, in the arms of Madame de Mailly, who forgave her all her treacheries. Madame de Mailly realised that the King's love for herself was dead, abandoned paint and patches for ever, and gave herself up to the poor. The death of the Chateauroux was to lead to an event of vast" importance to the Art of France. CHAPTER XXI WHEREIN A PRINCE, BECOMING KING, HURRIEDLY CHANGES HIS PRINTED IDEAS Brussels was at this time the capital of the Austrian Netherlands ; and an old lawsuit of the Marquis du Chatelet drew Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet to that city in 1739. Voltaire and Frederick of Prussia were now grown very intimate by letter ; and Voltaire was guiding the publication of the Prussian Prince's famous Anti- Machiavel through the press, when suddenly the Prince found himself King of Prussia, and promptly withdrew his Anti-Mac hiavel. " For God's sake," he writes to Voltaire, " buy up the whole edition of the Anti-Mac hiavel." Anti-Machiavelli, in fact, was strengthening his armies, and flinging into the waste-paper basket all the " paternal duties of kings to their subjects," laughing at "the iniquities of seeking glory through conquest," and himself preparing to start on " the horror of war." Frederick had manoeuvred to " own " Voltaire, apart from Madame ; Madame intrigued to prevent it. But the King and Voltaire at last met. Frederick was lying ill of fever ; but he roused supped with Voltaire and others, and debated the immortality of the soul, free-will, and Plato. A keen friendship resulted. A month later, Maria Theresa ascended the throne of the Emperors and Frederick decided to attack her. Voltaire went to Berlin to spy out Frederick's intentions, was cordially received, but went back as ignorant as he had gone. He was not built for diplomacies odd as it may seem. He was back in Paris when old Cardinal Fleury died on 90 ch.xxi A KING AND HIS PRINTED IDEAS 91 the 27th of January 1743, to see his drama Merope a huge success after the galling failure of his Mahomet. He failed in his designs on the Academy, though his friend Richelieu had the ear of the Chateauroux. Frederick leaped at Voltaire's disgust ; sent on extracts, from Voltaire's freely expressed private letters to him, to his envoy in Paris, to get him to let them leak out, hoping thereby to draw Voltaire to Berlin. Voltaire did go, but as a spy. Frederick, at first tricked, soon found him out, and weakened the Frenchman's diplomatic hopes in France by craftily letting him down. Voltaire returned to Cirey and his Madame du Chatelet, realising that he who had gone forth to dupe had been woefully befooled. CHAPTER XXII WHEREIN WE DISCOVER THE NARROW GULF THAT DIVIDES THE DANCING-GIRL FROM THE OLD MAID A pastel sketch of a head at Saint Quentin that draws one to it is that of a pretty woman, the famous dancer Camargo. Marie Anne Camargo was the daughter of an Italian of gentle birth ; for Joseph de Cuppi was of an ancient Roman family, which had given to the Church a bishop, an archbishop, and a cardinal. His daughter added her mother's illustrious name of Camargo to her own from an artistic sense that it was the more musical. Seven children strained the resources of Cuppi's nobility ; and the man took to the dance for livelihood, and taught his family how they might earn bread by the refined callings of music and painting and the dance. His beautiful daughter Marie Anne was to make the name of Camargo as illustrious in the theatre as her forefathers had made it illustrious in the drama of Italian history. Indeed, her tuneful name almost sets the feet tripping. Making her mark on the stage at Brussels and at Rouen, the girl came to the Opera at Paris, and at once became the sensation. Enthusiastic amongst her admirers and friends were Diderot, Grimm and many others of the philosophers, and as many famous in art and music and affairs. Voltaire burst into verse in her honour. The girl had as nice a mind as lightness of foot. She avoided the suggestive dances that were in the vogue, and seems to have brought a Spanish dignity into her pretty art. But the young bloods of the time looked upon a pretty dancer as their prey : a couple of years after her appearance at the Opera a young noble caused a 92 XV LA CAMARGO BY LA TOUR {At St. Quentin) ch.xxii DANCING-GIRL AND OLD MAID 93 scandal by carrying off the girl of eighteen and her young sister of thirteen and shutting them up in his town-mansion. The Camargo is said to have come out of the business safely, but her young sister fell to the galant. In the report drawn up by the girls' father to the Cardinal-Minister regarding the seizure of his daughters (wherein we discover that Cuppi is a knight and lord of Renoussar and Opperzielen), he demands that the injury done to his daughter by this act of the Comte de Clermont shall be followed by marriage, and the child of thirteen shall be dowered by her seducer. The King does not seem to have taken any notice of the grave affair ; but the town was clamouring for the return of its idol to the stage — the Camargo made every effort to get back to that stage, but the Comte de Clermont was so jealous of her that he would not let her go. This was the Comte de Clermont who sold to the King his duchy of Chateauroux for two millions six hundred thousand livres ; and gave to the Camargo a present of a hundred thousand livres. At any rate, whatever the true inwardness of the strange affair, soon afterwards the dancer appeared again at the Opera ; and the noise that the scandal had raised did her no disservice. It must be remembered that this girl was no mere ballet-girl of the boards. She was moving in high society ; her name appears recorded as godmother to more than one child with the names of the old noblesse, the Comte de Melun amongst the number. The dark beauty, with her hair powdered, is seen in La Tour's sketch — the completed picture has vanished. He has caught her charm, her distinction, the long oval of the face, the traditional long oval of Diane de Poitiers ; yet a serious note is behind the smile — a touch of gravity. La Tour seems to have been on friendly terms with the whole family ; he showed a portrait of the Camargo's amiable and kindly father at the Salon of 1747. The Camargo, having left the stage in 1734, went back to it in 1740, retiring after eleven years, in 1751, with a pension of 1500 livres. She settled down to a quiet and retired life in the Saint Roch quarter, 94 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch.xxii living her remaining nineteen years in hum-drum fashion enough, and surrounded by her dogs, like an old maid of the conventions, losing touch with her old companions, except one old friend, who attended her to the end of her days and gave her a stately funeral, the world taking off its hat to the white hangings of the solemn ritual that, as she went to her last resting-place, bore witness to the repute of her purity of life. XVI FRANCOIS BOUCHER BY LUNDBERG {Louvre) CHAPTER XXIII WHICH SUGGESTS A WASP IN HIGH PLACES Boucher seems to have turned his hand's skill to the pastel, probably led to it by the success of the coloured chalks of his intimate friend La Tour at the Salon of 1737, particularly the success of La Tour's portrait of Boucher's own wife. He employed the pastel to exquisite purpose in the few pictures wrought by his hand that have come down to us — the earliest bearing the date of 1738. But he was now turning his attention to his great landscapes ; and oils and the designing for tapestries left him scant time for the pastel, which he used with such skill. He was at the height of his powers and of his vogue. Masterpiece after masterpiece poured from his studio. We have a picture of him as he was in the flesh in his fortieth year — the pastel portrait of him that hangs in the Louvre, done by Lundberg, that artist's reception-piece on being elected to the Academy : a gay, somewhat devil-me-care dandy of a man, hand somely dressed, smiling out of his careless day, the debonair man of fashion ; his large eyes show no small hint of long night-carousals — indeed, betray such carousals rather than any whisper of those days of prodigious labour he spent at the easel. In his art, as in the gossip of him, there is a strange aloofness of the man from the real dramatic incidents of his day — no slightest hint of the France that lies groaning in harsh neglect under the heel of this strange King and his precious Ministers. His art breathes the spirit of the butterfly dandies of Paris, that but shrug a shoulder at France's dishonours. Of the real France, the France 95 96 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. from which even the King attempts to hide his weaknesses, from which the Chateauroux crouches in the corner of her carriage as she hears its cry for her blood spoken by rough tongues in the streets, not a suggestion. But the taste for the Homely and the True in art was now every day reaching to importance ; and Chardin and La Tour spoke direct to the new thought. In 1740 Lafont de Saint-Yenne, a critic not easily moved to praise, was writing of La Tour's " great reputation," ofhis " crowd of imitators " ; and speaking with enthusiasm of a fine portrait of M. Paris de Montmartel. La Tour showed this year at the Salon his M. de Bachaumont ; Madame Duret in an oval ; M. de (M. Perrinet de Faugnes) taking snuff — a portrait to the knees, and a masterpiece of craftsmanship. It was about this time that he drew the pictures of Louis the Fifteenth's four daughters, Les Mesdames, that have since vanished from his achievement. La Tour left them in 1768 to Marigny, the Pompadour's brother, as "les quatre tetes des Mesdames." In 1 74 1 he showed at the Salon his first pastel on a large scale (six feet two inches high by four feet eight inches wide), M. le President Bernard de Rieux, wherein we see the President in a red robe, seated on a velvet chair with a book in his hand — a large work, " of the importance of a picture," as the art-jargon of the sale-rooms has it, a work which is a triumph in the employment of the coloured chalks to express differing textures. He also sent to the same Salon the bust portrait of a Negro buttoning his Shirt. In 1742 again La Tour was to win to wide success with his pastel of Madame la Presidente de Rieux, in ball-dress, holding a mask; Mademoiselle Salle; M. I' Abbe (the Abbe Huber), seated on the arm of a chair, reading ; M. du Mont le Romain, the painter and Academician, playing a guitar ; and the Self-Portrait, with the brim of his cocked hat turned down, well known from its engraving by Schmidt. In 1743 he sent the Due de Villars, Governor of Provence a XVII STUDY OF A HEAD BY BOUCHER {Louvre) xxiii A WASP IN HIGH PLACES 97 dignified and handsome thing ; Parrocel, the painter and Academician ; the sculptor Rene Fremin, still at the Louvre — a picture which has been challenged by the De Goncourts as not being of the same person who sat for the sketch of Fremin at Saint Quentin. A portrait of a Mademoiselle de (Mademoiselle de Beaupre) appears in the Salon list ; but it was not to be seen when the doors of the Salon opened to the public. At this time the King had ordered, through the Director- General of Buildings, portraits of the Due d'Ayen, the Comte de Sassenage, and the Chevalier de Montaigne. Greater honours were in store for La Tour from the Court. No Salon was held in 1744 ; but at the Salon of 1745 La Tour is seen to be at the height of his vogue. He sends portraits of the King, now at the Louvre ; the Dauphin, also now at the Louvre ; Philip Orry, Comte de Vignorry, the Controller-General, the handsome pastel still to be seen at the Louvre, and which the critic Tourneux has discovered to have been sent to the Salon as M. , friend of the painter, full size. This was the year in which a critic wrote : " the prodigious La Tour is the king of pastel " ; and mentions the portraits of M. le Procureur-General and of M. Duval de I'Epinoy, together with " several other pieces under the same number?' La Tour was now at the height of his fame. On the 10th of March (1745) he was given the coveted prize of the artists — apartments at the Louvre — by the King, the rooms lately occupied by the " sieur Martinet," the King's watchmaker and valet-de-chambre. La Tour was in wide demand ; yet he was no easy taskmaster. His trying ways with his sitters were the gossip of the town. Mariette, the great art-collector, who left us his now famous Notes written upon the artists of his day, known as the Abecedario, complains of the suffering he was at, owing to the number of sittings La Tour demanded of him for his portrait, and of the severity of La Tour's self-criticism and of the difficulty of his satisfaction with his own works. La Tour would recklessly destroy work with which in a passing mood he was displeased. He tormented himself as to o 98 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. the quality of his craftsmanship, and even more concerning the amount of the sitter's character he had caught. He tormented his sitters even more with his moods. He also insisted on his sitters paying according to their wealth. Many stories are told of his wilfulnesses with his victims. He seemed to take a grim pleasure in making great personages sue for the honour of being painted by him, and in teasing and fretting them with his moods when they sat to him. He spared none according to their high degree. When he drew the portraits of the great ones of the Court, he made the business a trying one for them. The Dauphin he had no hesitation in twitting for his failings, reproaching him for the ease with which he was duped by fripperies ! placing where the Prince must see them the two Dissertations on the old word fatherland and On the Nature of the People, by Abbe Coyer ; or, coolly telling the Prince that his children were badly brought up ! He spoke flippantly of the Dauphiness Marie Josephe ; but after he came to paint her and found his affectations of gaucheries and brusqueries gently swept aside without notice, and met by gentle good-breeding and courtesy, he grew to respect her ; and to redeem his faults he was actually guilty of a gallantry, to which the amiable Princess retorted by sending him the gold snuff-box decorated with six paintings after Teniers, which La Tour ever held in such precious esteem, and left in his will to his executor. Worthy Mariette writes tartly of La Tour's effronteries and awkwardnesses and rudenesses at Court, and with the great ones of fashion — being duly shocked at his impudence in the presence of the King and of Princes ; and reads him a severe lesson for never knowing his place. He cannot even hide his resentment at the painter's love of the society of the Intellectuals, and of his preference for it above that of the Court, giving La Tour a nasty lash for speaking of great affairs in order to show his scholarship and knowledge, of which, says Mariette somewhat sourly, La Tour never failed to lay in a stock beforehand from Bayle's Dictionary ! La Tour was quick to fly into a passion, sarcastic of tongue, xxiii A WASP IN HIGH PLACES 99 of a tart wit, and of an ironic temper that cared neither whether it were king or haughty noble or the pompous arrogance of the self-made man that became the victim of his rapier retort. He stands out a forthright figure amidst his dandified age. He was of the North, and had much of the Englishman in his nature — above all, a rare sense of humour, for which the French tongue, odd to say, has not a word, though it has the gift. His picture shows his grim humour in every line of the whimsical features. There is something of our own Lawrence Sterne in the Frenchman, with less of sentimentality and more of forthrightness in the set of the head upon the shoulders. His was just the knight-errant temper to fling aside tradition and break a lance with convention — and he did it recklessly and with a swaggering glory in the recklessness. La Tour set a high value upon the work of his hand — as value went in his day. And, even with the high fees he charged to the rich, he was rarely satisfied when they paid him. But to the brilliant men of the time, the philosophic geniuses, and particularly such as were poor in pocket, he showed a sweetness of disposition and a gentleness that were in rare contrast with his wilfulnesses, tormentings, and grim humours in the presence of the merely rich and the merely great. . . . Chardin had overworked for pathetically small prices ; and the result was that in 1742 he became seriously ill. His art had increased in power year by year ; and his reputation with it. Mariette wrote, like the mediocrity that he was, with patronage it is true, of his " heavy and monotonous touch, his lack of facility," and the rest of it, including " lack of truth in colouring " ! Asses brayed even in the XVIIIme siecle. Diderot also fell to drivel about Chardin's "low nature" and the like. But Chardin used to paint alone — and the unenviable habit perhaps fretted the garrulous scribblers of his day, who resented being kept out of his studio. The loss of his wife and girl-child had been a bitter blow to the painter. His youth went with them. He had gone to live with ioo THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xxiii his mother after their death ; and she died in the November of 1743. He lived alone with his little son a while, then married again on the 26th of November 1744, Francoise Marguerite Pouget, a woman of thirty-seven years, widow of a musqueteer, from Rouen. She lived at No. 13 m the same Rue Princesse, and had some fortune. Chardin went to her home upon his marriage. She was a capable and business-like soul, who helped Chardin in the ordering of his life ; and of her he made his famous pastel at the Louvre, one of the greatest achievements in this medium. She was a somewhat austere stepmother to Chardin's boy. A girl was born of the marriage ; but did not live. Yet Chardin was not making money ; for we find the King being appealed to by the Academy for help for him in 1752 ; and Marigny writes to him to say that the King grants him a pension of five hundred livres. MADAME CHARDIN By Chardin in the Louvre CHAPTER XXIV WHEREIN A DAUGHTER OF THE BOURGEOISIE STRETCHES OUT HER PRETTY HAND TO THE SCEPTRE OF FRANCE Paris is whispering. Paris hears — all France hears — a strange, a mighty scandal that is to mean vast things to the nation. A young bride has been for some time the talk of the rich merchant class of Paris — that class that has steadily come to possess near upon all France. Merely the " people " under the old kings, it has become the " Third Estate " under Philip de Valois — thenceforth it has won to everything, has bought everything, does everything. Sneer at it the old noblesse may ; perhaps does not even realise its dominion, or but half-blindly. It fills the twelve Parliaments of Louis XV., the seats of the magistracy, the law courts ; it leads finance ; even sends near a quarter of its officers to the army, and to the Church even more. The offices of State, all the important and significant offices, are held by it. It controls the money. It commands the money. From the farmer- general of taxes to the clerk it is in unacknowledged power ; and that power daily increases. Nay ; this party of Finance marries now into the old noblesse. It has begun to think. Arts and letters are created by it. To its great ones belong the great houses, luxury, splendour, collections of pictures — to the farmers-general. And to it at last has been born a woman who shall stand beside the very throne of France. A remarkable young woman : her beauty, her lively wit, her brilliant talents and fine accomplishments are the gossip of the IOI 102 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. town. Her very name is charming — Madame Lenormant d'Etioles — trips like song of nightingale from the tongue. Who was she ? Whence came she ? Well ; we have been at her birth. It is our once Jeanne Poisson — Jane Fish. How the ribald songs of the Paris gutters, written by spiteful, witty old Maurepas himself, the King's Minister, are going to thrash that jest of Jane Fish to ribands ! Daughter she was, as we have seen, of a scandalous financial fellow, who had fingered the public monies in an ugly fashion to his own ends, and been found out — had indeed been banished for the nasty business, and was in truth in banishment when Jane popped into the world. At least daughter she is by courtesy ; this Poisson was husband to Jane's mother, herself no better than she need be — and the wags winked knowingly, jerking a thumb of accusation at the dandified fine fellow, Monsieur Lenormant de Tournehem, who had been the favoured one during the enforced travels of Monsieur Poisson. Lenormant de Tournehem takes astounding interest in the child ; gives her good schooling ; and the girl springing up to young womanhood, he pays handsomely for the teaching of all the accomplishments by the best masters — the greatest artists of the day from the Opera teaching the beautiful creature music, Crebillon himself instructing her in declamation and letters. Poisson, the father, being returned, takes the generous Lenormant de Tournehem to his arms — is he not rich ? Lenormant de Tournehem ends the pretty business by lifting Jane into the ranks of the money'd aristocracy, making his nephew Lenormant d'Etioles marry the beautiful girl, giving a half of his great wealth to the young couple for dowry, and promise of the remainder at his death. A consequential little man, and upright according to his lights, is this nephew Lenormant d'Etioles, lord of Etioles and other seignories. " Uncle " Lenormant de Tournehem even provides for the young couple handsome town-house and country-seat on the grand scale, where Madame gathers about her the most brilliant circle of wits and artists of the day — gay Boucher amongst the xxiv A DAUGHTER OF THE BOURGEOISIE 103 number, and La Tour, and biting Voltaire, who is all smiles in the radiance, and the rest. Nay ; is not Madame herself a philosophe ? But this beautiful girl, Madame d'Etioles, has had since child hood (" twelve years ! ") an absorbing silent ambition. She now confides it to her cynical mother and to "uncle" Lenormant de Tournehem ; and that woman of fashion and the worldly man promise all aid. She has set her dogged will, learnt all her accomplishments, trained herself with elaborate cold-blooded cunning, to seduce the King of France. She is almost virtuous about it — swears she will wrong her D'Etioles for none other but the King. After much intriguing — the country-house lies hard by the royal hunting-grounds — she catches the wandering eye of the King. The 'Chateauroux checks the advance ; whereon Madame d'Etioles withdraws from the siege until the death of the King's mistress. After the death of the Chateauroux the King made a supreme effort to return to his duty to the Queen. But the woman's heart, broken by a thousand humiliations, was dead to him. He was repulsed, became bored by the dulness of the life — entered into wild ways again. At the great masked ball on the Sunday before Lent, given at the H6tel de Ville, a beauty plagues and interests the King all evening. At the King's bidding she unmasks with all present ; drops a handkerchief in affected nervousness — Louis Quinze picks it up — so that the whole Court murmurs, " The handkerchief has been thrown." A bitter Court intrigue is at once a-gog. But a few nights after, Madame Lenormant d'Etioles is stealthily smuggled into the private apartments of the King, where the Demoiselles de Nesle have been wont to queen it. Rumour spreads. She comes again ; but ends the night with sudden, feigned terror — her husband has missed her before, has traced her — she dare not go back to certain death. The King is moved, and lets her hide herself from thenceforth in the secret apartments. To the beautiful creature, who thus so dramatically interests his bored day, he 104 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. promises his protection, a lodging, her husband's banishment to his estates, and early acknowledgment of the high honour of titular and accepted mistress — before the whole Court in Easter week, says the pious Great One. The which pious decision was only put off by the sudden need for Louis to join the army and win the victory of Fontenoy, whence he returns to Paris a conqueror. The victory of Fontenoy was celebrated by Voltaire in a poem which went through five editions in ten days. Voltaire, an old friend of Madame d'Etioles, now paid her the full homage of his pen. On the 14th of September, Madame d'Etioles was presented to the Court, proceeded to the Queen's apartments to pay her devoirs, and in her twenty-third year was raised to the great aristocracy of France as Marquise de Pompadour. The religious set about the Queen, shocked that the King should choose as mistress one who was a friend of freethinkers like Voltaire, and not from his own Church ! the nobility shocked that the King should stoop to choose a mistress from any class but their own, the old noblesse of France, that had always had this privilege ! the royal family sulking at the humiliation ! the crafty eyes of Maurepas, he who hated any woman to come between him and the King, glittered. He knew that the King could not do without him ; and the weapon of hate in his hands was strengthened by the enmity of near upon all France. The Court, the royal family, and the old noblesse above all — nay, did they not openly speak their scorn in that " the choice of one so low-born detracts from the honour of the King's adultery " ? A strange France, indeed ! But Maurepas found an enemy such as he had never before known ; as cold-blooded as he, as unscrupulous, as witty, as relentless, as unmerciful, as watchful, in this beautiful woman. He might write his satirical verses, and spread the singing of them along the streets of Paris. He had met his match. The Court party about the Queen and Dauphin fought the xxiv A DAUGHTER OF THE BOURGEOISIE 105 Pompadour day and night for possession of the King, with a venom and an ever-watchful intrigue that never slackened, led by the hate of Maurepas. Nothing was too foul or too low whereunto these of the old nobility should stoop ; nothing too ignoble. The Pompadour seemed to bring the King luck. Marshal Saxe moved on from victory to victory. The French dream of Empire in India looked assured; when, in the October of 1748, the nations, exhausted by war, came to terms of peace at Aix-la- Chapelle. That treaty cost France the reward of her sacrifices in the long and bloody conflict ; left her with her commerce well-nigh ruined, her navy crippled, her national debt increased by twelve millions of French money. But she stood on a proud pre-eminence of political power. She was rapidly to grow in material wealth, intellectual activity, and the outward refinements of civilisation. Only the social condition of her people gave thoughtful minds grave pause to ponder in solemn misgivings and awed alarm. France has ever been distinguished as the land of a people with a keen sense of justice, and of an intellect that breeds clear-sighted men. She bred such men now. Even amidst her mad follies there was arising a school of thinkers. She was quickening with great men who were to test her ancient faith, her ancient State, her constitution ; trying them as by fire to see if they were creating the noblest people, the best citizens, the best form of government — at the very moment that her King and governing classes were coming out to enjoy themselves in a saturnalia of riotous living. For, peace was no sooner signed than Louis Quinze relapsed into his wonted habit of dandified indolence and indifference. He laid aside his duties as the lord of a great people ; gave himself up to shameless riot, and allowed the Pompadour to usurp his magnifi cence, and to rule over the land. For the next sixteen years she was the most powerful person at Court, the greatest force in the State — making and unmaking Ministers, disposing, like a Sovereign, of office, honours, titles, pensions. Louis squandered upon her 106 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. person seventy-two millions of the public monies, as they now value it. All affairs of State were discussed and arranged under her guidance ; ministers, ambassadors, generals transacted their business in her stately boudoirs ; the whole patronage of the Sovereign and of the Government was dispensed by her pretty hands ; the prizes of the Church, of the army, of the magistracy, could be obtained solely through her favour and good-will. Her energy must have been prodigious. Such an one as this could be no ordinary woman. She was possessed of an extraordinary combination of talents, rare accomplishments, and astounding taste. To these she gave full rein. But this her sovereignty over the King, easy and light in outward seeming, was a haggard-eyed nightmare to the woman who had so craved for it, before she knew the ghastly struggle that it meant. The Pompadour knew no moment's rest from the day she won to the King's bed. She had to fight her enemies, who stood round about the King, secret and open alike, for possession of her lord, day and night, as if for very life — and she fought. She won by consummate skill, some throws of luck, and unending courage. Yet from each day's victories, she soon realised that she must know no hour's rest. The Court party fought her for power. Maurepas, who had made the Chateauroux's life a burden to her, brought his unscrupulous wit, his mimicry, his vile jibes and un- chivalrous cynicism and hatred to bear against the Pompadour from the day she came into the King's life — he employed all those gifts that so tickled the cynic humour of the King. He had made himself a necessity to the King ; and he never slept away a chance of injuring her. He knew no mercy, no nobility, no pity, no scruple. He made her the hated object of the people ; with his own hand wrote the witty and foul verses and epigrams that were sung and flung about the streets of Paris. But she had an enemy more subtle and insidious than any at the Court, whether in the King's apartments or the Queen's or on the backstairs ; she had a task far heavier than these bitter courtiers and ministers ever gave her, and they were without xxiv A DAUGHTER OF THE BOURGEOISIE 107 scruple or honour — hour by hour she had to dispute the King with the King's boredom. And it was in this effort that she called Boucher and the artists to her aid. One of her first moves was her celebrated theatre in the private apartments. It was set up in the Cabinet des Medailles. The first play was by Voltaire, L'Enfant Prodigue. Here the greatest in the land vied with each other to play the smallest parts — marchionesses of the old noblesse were content if they might but carry a banner ; the Prince of Hesse was one of the dancers, the Prince de Dombes was proud to play the bassoon in the orchestra, the Due de Chartres joined the company with difficulty. A great noble promised the Pompadour's maid a command in the army for one of her kin if she would get him the part of the police-officer in Tartuffe ! The greatest in France scrambled for an invitation to a performance. Her power so greatly increased that she took open command of the King's will. She dared, and succeeded, in getting Maurepas banished — though she did not reckon on Maurepas passing on his hatred to his friend the crafty D'Argenson. Henceforth she used the kingly " We." A single arm-chair told all to remain standing in the favourite's presence. She gets her father created Lord of Marigny, her brother Marquis de Vandieres — he whom the King called "little brother," and liked well. Her child Alexandrine d'Etioles is taught to sign her Christian name only, like a princess ; and her mother is setting to work to get her affianced to one of the greatest princes in France, when the small-pox takes the twelve- year-old child. She amasses a private fortune, and castles and estates undreamed of by any other mistress. Into them she pours art-treasures. These things cost the nation thirty-six millions of money. She created the porcelain factories of Sevres, which robbed Dresden of a great part of its position, and brought a large industry and revenue to France. She watched over the Gobelins looms. She founded the great military school of Saint-Cyr. 108 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xxiv In the midst of work that would have broken many states men, in the midst of deadly intrigues, she kept complete control of the art production of the land ; herself saw a tragedy of Corneille's through the press, and acted as printer's reader to its printing ! XVIII PORTRAIT OF A GIRL BY PERRONNEAU {Private Collection) CHAPTER XXV WHEREIN A NEW STAR APPEARS ABOVE THE HORIZON On the 27th of the August of 1746, the Royal Academy "accepted" the presentation of an artist named "Jean Baptiste Perronneau of Paris," and ordered the director to settle as to which portraits " of the said Sieur" should be his pictures-of-reception. We have seen the youth Perronneau flitting in somewhat ghostly fashion through old Pere Cars' engraving studios, where was Boucher blithely living his industrious genial day. Of his early days little is known — even less than of La Tour's. That the new " agree " was the son of Henri Perronneau, a burgess of Paris, and of Marie Genevieve Fremont ; that he became apprenticed as an engraver to the father of Laurent Cars, " Pere de Cars," and entered as such into the workshop where were engraved the prints for sale in Pere Cars' shop in the Rue Saint Jacques, we know. But whether he attended the art-course of the Royal Academy the while, as did Boucher, we have no hint. He is said to have been the pupil of Natoire, with Vien as fellow-student. The chart of Perronneau's restless wayfaring through the fantastic century in which he lived is lost to us, largely through his having missed the favour of the Court. His art of portraiture was wrought amongst the well-to-do middle-class, " who have no history," as they say in France. This to a portrait-painter is a serious loss in many ways — for the pictures of men and women who are above their fellows by personality must necessarily be of far greater value than the record of the mediocre, apart from the enthusiasm which is spurred by a wide success. Yet, if as portrait- 109 no THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. painter Perronneau had to be content with his " sisters and his cousins and his aunts," his neighbours, his friends, and his comrades in art, with a rare prince or princess breaking at times into the genial company, the good fortune at least is ours, since he gives us as they walked the ordinary and accomplished folk of his day — the people who are the backbone of a generation. Perronneau came to the business with another, more serious, drawback to the dis entangling of his career — his unstable and gadding habits took him wandering over Europe like a dandified gypsy ; and his unquiet spirit was dogged by the shadow of ill-luck to his grave — indeed, ill-luck continued to dog him when dead. All record of his birth or baptism is vanished, and his elegant and beautifully-balanced signature baffles our peering scrutiny into his earlier career. He makes his bow to us diffidently enough on the printed page, with his signature to an engraving of a title-page to the sculptor Bouchardon's Livre de diverses figures d Academies dessinees d'apres le naturel, in 1738. He was drawn from oils to the coloured chalks by tempera ment, as was La Tour. In 1740 he signed the pastel -portrait of Mademoiselle Desfriches, which displays the early craftsmanship and the hesitations and awkwardnesses of a hand not yet facile in skill or under control. But facility and skill came hurrying to him forthwith ; in six years — six years which leave us with out hint of his doings or his labours — he was admitted to the Academy, and was the talk of the studios with his brilliant portraits at the Salon of 1746. Perronneau has arrived, at a bound, as it appears. The formal " reception " of Perronneau into the Academy makes a quaint event in the schoolmasterly attitude that comes upon all academic bodies. The pastel, since Rosalba brought it to Paris, had come into an extraordinary vogue. About the time of Perronneau's appearance at the Academy a strong reaction had set in against its use, as being too easy and too ephemeral. This xxv A NEW STAR APPEARS in reaction revealed itself three months before Perronneau's election, at the election of another pastellist, whose name has, like his, long passed into the shades of forgetfulness — Alexis Loir, who was received on the 30th of April 1746, not on the merits of his pastels, but on " his talent for modelling " ! Perronneau, though no such make shift was employed to grease the doors of the Academy in opening to receive him, did not wholly escape the slur of disparagement to his art ; he was called upon to paint, for his two " portraits-of- reception," Oudry and Adam aine in oils, before he could be definitely admitted to take his seat as Academician ! Perronneau spent seven years in clearing this debt ; but he used his right to display his work at the Salons from the start, and 1746 saw five pastels from his hands — the Marquis d'Aubail (d'Aubais) en cuirasse ; the Hubert Drouais, that painter of a line of painters, who was to see his accomplished son and grandson grow up and win to success and die before him ; Gilcain (Francois Gille- quin, the painter) ; and The Young Scholar, brother of the artist, holding a book, being of the number. The following year (1747) Perronneau sent to the Salon six portraits — of which the five-year-old son of the sculptor Lemoyne alone is known to us. But the M. in ball dress ; the M. Huquier and The son of M. Huquier holding a rabbit ; the Madame Villeneuve hold ing her muff; and the M. L are of this year, as is the Comte de Bastard, engraved by Gilbert. In 1748, as Tourneux neatly puts it, Perronneau innocently mixed the sacred and the profane, sending the Most Reverend Abbe of Saint-Genevieve with a dancer of the Royal Academy of Music to keep him company, together with the bass of the same theatre, a couple of honest citizens of Marseilles, and a sister of the archi tect to the King. Whether the Mile. Delepee the younger, painted in this year, were of the number is unknown. In 1750 Perronneau was represented by fifteen portraits in oils and pastels, but he set few names to them, of which, at any rate, were Beaumont, the engraver ; Thiboust, the printer to the King, and 112 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xxv his wife ; and M. Kam (Le Kain ?). Of these fifteen was the famous Mile. holding a little cat, now at the Louvre. But it was to a far other cause that Perronneau was to become prominent at this Salon of 1750 — through his portrait of Maurice Quentin de La Tour, now at Saint Quentin, about which a slander was whispered and rapidly grew. XIX YOUNG GIRL WITH A CAT BY PERRONNEAU {Louvre) CHAPTER XXVI WHICH HINTS AT SCANDAL OF A THORN IN THE BED OF ROSES Boucher was now at the height of his fame and his achievement. La Tour also reached to the supreme employment of his great gifts. He sent to the Salon of 1746 four portraits, of which one was Restout (2) and another Paris de Montmartel. The Restout is the portrait to be seen to-day at the Louvre, ruined by the frequent retouchings and " fixings " which La Tour inflicted upon it. In this year La Tour was advanced to the rank of Academician. In the following year (1747) several portraits in pastels appear under his name, of which were the Comtesse de Lowendahl ; the Marechal de Saxe ; the Duke of York, " aujourd 'hui cardinal" ; Madame de Montmartel ; the Comte de Clermont (hero of the Camargo romance, as I take it) ; Lemoyne, the sculptor ; Binet ; the Abbe le Blanc, that kindly champion of the artists, he " who could never find fault"; Gabriel, the first architect to the King; Cupis (either the dancing father to the Camargo, or her brother) ; Mondonville, the famous musician ; and Madame Drevet, wife of the engraver. In 1748, as the De Goncourts neatly put it, the list of the painter's works in the catalogue to the Salon reads like a page from the Almanack de Gotha ; for there hung upon the walls the portraits of the King (No. 2), now at the Louvre ; the Queen (Marie Leczinska, No. 2), also at the Louvre ; the Dauphin (No. 2) , also to be seen at the Louvre ; Prince Edouard ; the Marechal de Belle-Isle ; the Marechal de Saxe (No. 2), also in the collection at the Louvre ; the Marechal de Lowendahl ; the Comte de Sassenage ; Messieurs de Savalette de Buchelay, pere et fils ; M. de Moncrif of the Academie 113 Q ri4 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. francaise ; Madame and a second Madame ; M. du Clos, of the Academie francaise ; and M. du Mont le Romain (No. 2) adjoint a Restout. It was at this Salon that Pierre, the painter to the King, showed several pastels, which were compared by the critics with La Tour's work — to Pierre's grievous disadvantage. It was also unfortunately about this time that La Tour was experimenting with his " secret " for " fixing " pastels — by applying spirits of wine to the back of the paper on which the work was done, and immediately afterwards a fine white varnish (verm's blanc) — which was to cause such serious damage to several of his works, as we read in Bachaumont's writings of 1750. To the Salon of the following year, 1749, La Tour sent his portrait of the second Dauphiness, Marie Josephe de Saxe, holding a piece of music, and now at Dresden. In 1750 La Tour exchanged his apartments in the Louvre for those of Pigalle, beginning that restless moving from rooms to rooms in the old palace that was to become a joke against him amongst his comrades. All now went merrily for Maurice Quentin de La Tour ; yet there is gossip of a thorn in his bed of roses. To the Salons of 1750 and 1751, his forty-sixth and forty-seventh years, La Tour sent many portraits under the vague title of " Several heads in pastel." We can but disentangle the sitters from the notices of the critics of the day in rude fashion. And the gossip of jealousy eating into La Tour's day of triumph is a part of their penmanship. Diderot stooped to it, but in old age, some seventeen years afterwards • and his memory seems to have treated him scurvily as to the details therefore, likely enough, as scurvily as to the whole business. The pastels of Jean Baptiste Perronneau had been steadily rising in the esteem of the critics, Salon by Salon, since his admittance to the Academy in 1746— that year in which La Tour had been raised to the higher rank of Academician. Gossip has it that La Tour, scowling at the younger man's XX MAURICE QUENTIN DE LA TOUR BY LA TOUR {At Amiens Museum) xxvi A THORN IN THE BED OF ROSES 115 increasing vogue, arranged with Perronneau that he should draw La Tour's portrait for the coming Salon of 1750 ; and forthwith secretly made a portrait of himself in the same attitude, which, he arranged with Chardin, who had the hanging to carry out, should be pendant to it. The result is said to have been to the discomfiture of the younger artist. The tale lacks truth in detail. Chardin was little likely to take part in the abasing of any man, least of all a young painter. La Tour's jealousy, had he had any such, of Perronneau would have rested on wider authority than an old man's cackle. It is questioned whether Chardin had the hanging in that particular year ; but gossip skips just as airily to the other hanger. The mere fact that Portail is credited by one gossip, and not Chardin, as being persuaded to it by La Tour, increases the doubt. Perronneau did, as a fact, draw La Tour in a pose much like the famous pastel by La Tour of himself at Amiens ; and the triumph is with La Tour. This fact is more likely to have led to the malicious legend being invented than is the malice of La Tour to have led to the gossip tattle. Besides, the gossips talked at random, for Diderot seems to have had his eye of invention upon a wholly different self-portrait by La Tour, for which no pendant is known by Perronneau ! nor is Perronneau likely to have been caught twice in the same trap. There is no " hat turned down at the side " in Perronneau's head of La Tour. It is the Perronneau portrait of him, so like his own hatless self-portrait at Amiens, which La Tour possessed ; and which hangs to-day, by his brother's deed of gift, at Saint Quentin ! To the Salon of 175 1 La Tour again sent " Several pastel heads," which, however, Mariette's Notes more or less discover to us to have been the M. de la Reyniere ; the Madame de la Reyniere ; the M. Baillon, clockmaker to the King ; the M. Gamier, Controller of Buildings ; the M. Roettiers, engraver of the coinage of France ; Mademoiselle Sylvia of the Comedie-Italienne ; and M. Dille. La Tour was in this his forty-seventh year (1751) raised to the rank of " councillor " in the Academy — the highest grade to which a " mere 116 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xxvi portrait-painter " could reach. It was a long-delayed honour tardily given to the man, not only on account of the medium he employed for his artistry, but rather a tardiness due to the courageous struggle he carried on against what he considered to be the low prices paid by the State to men of genius for their works. During the somewhat bitter wrangle we have seen him trying to fix the price at 3000 livres ; and having to accept 2000. But his was not the spirit to be bought off from justice by bribes ; and he indignantly refused the cordon pf the order of Saint Michael, which would have conferred nobility upon him ; nor did his " greed of gain " urge him at any rate to ask for a pension of 1000 livres, that might easily have fallen to him, for he begged it for his friend Parrocel and his master Restout. After 1 75 1 the Salons were only held every two years. CHAPTER XXVII WHEREIN WE SEE A FRENCHMAN PLAYING THE PART OF TURK Jean Etienne Liotard was winning to wide success as painter, pastellist, engraver, miniaturist, enameller, and what not, when suddenly in 1735 he turned his back on the city that was making him one of its idols, and, joining the suite of the French Ambassador to Naples, the Marquis de Puysieux, he started on that restless wandering life that was to be his career for the rest of his days. From Naples he visited many picture galleries in Italy, making a large number of sketches and studies. The Pope sent for him to Rome, with the sculptor Le Blanc ; and he painted there, not only Clement XIL, but several of the Cardinals, as well as doing much portraiture in pastels. Though pressed by the Papal Court and Roman Society to settle in Rome, drawn by tales of the Levant he joined some English noblemen and went with them to Constantinople, where he settled down and lived for four years, visiting Smyrna and other cities there around. He allowed his beard to grow long and took to the Eastern dress, hence his nickname of "The Turk." From Turkey he went to Moldavia, doing many portraits and other artistic work for the Prince at Jassy. In 1749 he was at Vienna, where he was received by the Emperor Francis I. and the Empress Maria Theresa ; painted their portraits, and those of most of the members of the Imperial family, in spite of his Mahomedan pose and dress and the beard — perhaps because of it, since posing and eccentricity have their advertisement. The year 1751 saw him again in Paris, the centre of a huge success, and one of the crazes of the town. To the Salons of 117 118 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xxvii i 75 i and 1753 he sent works, which brought him almost a triumph, and must have swept him into the Academy had it not been that his unconventional life barred him in the eyes of the pious King and his bigoted advisers. However, this high morality attitude was but a matter of etiquette ; for royalty smiled upon " The Turk." He painted several miniatures of the King's sacred majesty ; whilst many of the fancy-boxes, bracelets, and the like fal-lals of the royal Princesses were decorated by his skilful hands. But " The Turk," beard and gaberdine and all, got restless after two years of incessant flattery, and tearing himself away from the gay city, he risked the sea-sickness of the Straits of Dover, and landed in England in 1753. In London he was as great a success as every where else. The Princess of Wales sat to him, the young Princes and Princesses likewise, and many of the great nobility. For three years " The Turk " knew London town, and was one of the sensations. However, " The Turk's " beard was near grown its full length. In 1756 the wander-spirit took hold of Liotard again, and he departed into Holland. Here he painted or pastelled the Dutch Court. But Cupid fought him for the gaberdine. Marie Fargues, the pretty daughter of a French merchant of Amsterdam it was that drove the East out of his skull. He married her in the July of 1757, as the grey was beginning to besprinkle the beard; and she, the knot being tied, promptly made him shave off the beard, fling away the gaberdine, and array himself in European breeches and the wig and coat of fashion. In Holland he settled for several years — some sixteen years, that would have seemed to have burnt out the wander-spirit ; but his seventieth year was to see him packing again, as we shall see. Amsterdam possesses several of his masterpieces ; and not least is the famed pastel of La Belle Liseuse (The Pretty Reader). XXI JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU BY LA TOUR {At St. Quentin) CHAPTER XXVIII WHEREIN WE SEE JEAN JACQUES SEATED RIDICULOUSLY ON A RUSH-BOTTOMED CHAIR In 1753, when La Tour, on the eve of fifty, came to make the portrait of Rousseau, the author of the Devin de Village was but forty- one, and had not yet discovered the corruption of the age. Jean Jacques, in truth, had his eye rather on the Opera House than on the salvation of the people. He was under the wing of the farmer-general De la Popeliniere ; and, had the Duke of Richelieu's wishes been carried out and Rousseau's opera of the Muses galantes been performed at Court, it is a nice question whether the fevers of that restless spirit would not have been drawn aside from politics to the artistic excitements and contentment of a successful dramatic career. The amiable gentle features that La Tour's skill of hand drew for us at this time show little hint of a World-Disturber. It is in the list of the pictures at the Salon of this year that we find, nevertheless, that characteristic touch of ambition which screens itself behind humility — for the name appears as Rousseau, citizen of Geneva. It is a new rank, this title of citizen, thus employed in Paris in 1753 — a rank that is to have a strange and alarming significance before another forty years are run : that is to ring out with something of regal magnificence, as though heralds announced it before a conqueror. It was but fit that that other restless spirit La Tour should have been destined to record and limn him. We know how La Tour, wayward and troublesome with the great about the Court, showed astounding sympathy and gentleness with the out-at-elbows 119 120 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. poet and sensitive philosopher. Intimate as he was with the group of thinkers of his day, La Tour has unfortunately left us no master- portrait of Diderot nor of Grimm nor of D'Holbach. But he was drawn by many affinities of nature and of mind towards the plagued soul of the man who was to write F\mile. And he wrought for us that immortal mask of Voltaire. Rousseau was fortunate in being limned by La Tour at a stage in the development of the great pastellist's art when that art was changing to the mood of its supreme achievement. It was of this portrait that Diderot (perhaps not without a certain amount of acidity, for Rousseau was still a young man to glitter as philosopher, and was not one of the galaxy that circled about D'Holbach) wrote fatuous qualifications, rare in him when touching upon La Tour's art. His truthful and sublime La Tour " has made the portrait of M. Rousseau but a pretty affair instead of the masterpiece that he could have made it. I seek there for the censor of letters, the Cato and the Brutus of our age ; I expected to see Epictetus in negligent array, carelessly be-wigged, frightening with his severe air the writers, the great ones, and the people of the earth. And I see but the author of Devin de Village, well clothed, sprucely combed, powdered, and ridiculously seated on a rush- bottomed chair. . . ." The sneer about a poet " ridiculously seated on a rush-bottomed chair " came quaintly from philosopher Diderot, with his everlasting demand for truth to nature in works of art ! He evidently thought that Rousseau should have been astride a lute, or aboard a unicorn, or reclining on clouds, with straws in his hair. Rousseau, at any rate, liked the picture well, and found no fault with the smile, nor greatly resented the neatness of his attire. It was done during Rousseau's stay at Montmorency. It figures afterwards in his Confessions : " La Tour came to see me and brought me my portrait in pastel, which he had shown at the Salon several years ago. He had wished to give me this portrait, which I had not accepted ; but Madame d'Epinay, who had given me hers and who XXII D'ALEMBERT BY LA TOUR {M. Danjon's Collection) xxviii JEAN JACQUES ON A CHAIR 121 wished to have mine, had made me ask it of him again. . He had made use of the time to retouch it." Rousseau, having fallen out with his fair benefactress, kept the portrait, and later (in 1760) gave it to the Marechal de Luxembourg. La Tour painted a replica of Rousseau in 1764, when Jean Jacques was a refugee in Switzerland, eleven years after the other. The philosopher accepted this one with gratitude and deep affection, touched by the honour. The high esteem of the two men for each other rings out in a letter of Rousseau's, wherein he speaks of the consolation that the gift of the portrait brought him in his mis fortunes ; cautions the utmost care in the carriage of it to him for fear of damage ; and assures La Tour that the picture shall never leave him, that it shall be under his eyes each day of his life, and shall be left to his family after him. To this Salon of 1753, besides his Rousseau, citizen of Geneva, La Tour sent the Madame le Comte, holding a piece of music ; Madame de Geli (or Barbaut-Gelly), that Madame Barbaut-Gelly whose letter remains still somewhat more ardent in its rusty ink than is usual between a painter and his sitter : " You have been my hero for a long while, and I eagerly desire to belong to you or to no one " ; Madame de Mondonville, leaning on a harpsicord ; Madame Huet, with a lapdog ; Mademoiselle Ferrand, meditating on Newton ; Mademoiselle Gabriel; the Marquis de Voyer d'Argenson, lieutenant- general of the cavalry of the King ; the Marquis de Montalembert ; De Sylvestre, the first painter to the King of Poland and director of the Royal Academy ; Bachaumont, the amateur ; Watelet, the receiver- general of finance and an honorary member of the Academy ; Nivelle de La Chaussee, of the Academy francaise ; Duclos ; the Abbe Nollet ; D'Alembert of the Royal Academy of Science, and a member of the Royal Society of London, which was vowed an " astounding likeness," even by the censorious Grimm and the fierce Freron (the superb sketch for which is at Saint Quentin) ; and Manelli, in the r61e of the Impressario in the opera of Maitre de Musique. This was the year in which Voltaire's adversary, the " terrible R 122 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xxviii Freron," .gave forth his high tribute to the art of La Tour in spite of his detestation of Voltaire and the new philosophy. He waxed funny about the Rousseau, affecting to have heard that Rousseau had quarrelled with La Tour for setting his austere body softly upon a rush-bottomed chair when he should have placed him " upon a bench, a rock, the earth itself." It so happened that most of this superb set of portraits showed the sitters smiling ; and the critics pumped much jocularity out of the fact, cracking comicalities, as was almost inevitable, about the fact that the very philosophers seemed to grin like buffoons in the presence of Manelli's infectious laughter. MANELLI By De La Tour at St. Quentin CHAPTER XXIX WHICH TELLS HOW A KING OF PRUSSIA THOUGHT TO CAGE A Voltaire had been defeated in his attempt to get into the Academy by Boyer, Bishop of Mirepoix, and tutor to the Dauphin, allied with the devout Court party ; he now checkmated his old enemy by winning into the favour of the good-natured, easy-going, worldly pontiff, Benedict XIV., to whom Voltaire dedicated his Mahomet as the " head of the true religion." The Pope replied to his " dear son " with his " apostolic benediction " ! One can imagine the smile behind that crafty, witty mask of La Tour's portrait of Voltaire. The King's dislike of Voltaire, sapped by the poet's adulation and by the Pompadour's influence, grew less icy ; and on the 25th of April 1746 Voltaire was elected to the French Academy. His political foresight, however, again failed him this year. Owing to the utter failure of Richelieu's descent on England on behalf of the young Pretender, Voltaire's pompous manifesto, composed and written to be issued on Richelieu's landing, was made into waste- paper. He was, however, rewarded with the appointment of gentleman- of- the-bedchamber to the King. But he was coldly received at table by the courtiers ; and the King did not even smile upon him. Triumphs, immediately followed by disgrace, were the law of Voltaire's hot career. One winter's evening in 1747, the Court being at Fontainebleau, play was very high ; and Madame du Chatelet lost £3360 (84,000 francs). Voltaire foolishly said to her in English that she was playing with knaves. An angry buzz showed that they had been understood. That night Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet 123 124 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. drove off to the chateau of Sceaux to their old friend, the Duchess of Maine, who hid him from the storm. There, concealed in a room, he wrote by candle-light during the day, to creep out to the dainty supper provided by the Duchess beside her bed at night, and to read the oriental tales that he had been writing during the day, Zadic, Babone, and the rest, written in subtle satire of the rottenness of France. Madame du Chatelet, having at last raised the money to pay her gambling debt, was received back at Court — the shutters were opened in Voltaire's room at Sceaux, and to the brilliant gatherings there he again read his stories, which at once became widely popular, and had a large effect. Voltaire, however, was soon foul of the King again, flying to the Court of King Stanislas, Duke of Lorraine, the Queen's father, where he and Madame du Chatelet were eagerly welcomed. All was smiling when Madame du Chatelet flung a bomb — she fell in love. Saint-Lambert, who commanded a company of the King's regiment of Guards, was a handsome, clever, poetical fellow of thirty-one, Madame was forty- two. She did the love-making, and he was flattered. Secret letters and stolen interviews ended in discovery. Voltaire was furious ; but gave in after Madame's calm remark that he had grown cool to her, and she needed some one to love her. Peace followed ; and Voltaire wrote to Saint-Lambert the famous verses, " Thine the hand that gathers roses, but for me the thorns." He was, in fact, more taken up with his drama Semiramis, written to outshine Crebillon, whom the King and the Pompadour had taken up. He went to Paris for the first performance, but though he packed the pit against his enemies, the play was not a triumph. The King and the Pompadour's presence, in the following year, at the first performance of Crebillon's Catiline, Voltaire doggedly essayed to blot out with his tragedy on the same subject, Rome Sauvee ; but feeling the King's disfavour, he gave up his office of gentleman-of- the-bedchamber to the King, retaining the right to the dignity, which he sold for 60,000 livres (£2400). But Madame du Chatelet was about to become a mother. She CREBILLON By De La Tour at St. Quentin xxix A KING OF PRUSSIA 125 had a premonition of her doom ; she put her papers in sealed packets, addressed them, and resigned herself. A little daughter arrived on the 4th of September, whilst Madame du Chatelet, pen in hand, was at work on her book upon Newton. The Marquis du Chatelet, Saint-Lambert, and Voltaire were in attendance. Six days afterwards, Madame du Chatelet slept peacefully away — September 10, 1749. Voltaire was torn with grief. His great gift of absorption in work saved him. He behaved most generously to the Marquis : he had already compromised the law-suit for him, bringing him 200,000 livres ; he now packed up his own belongings at Cirey, and with his widowed niece settled in the mansion in Paris where he and Madame had aforetime lived. Voltaire's income was now large — some £10,000 a year in present monies. Fifty-five, and suffering in body, he wrote Oreste in opposition to Crebillon's Electra. The piece was played amidst riot in the theatre. Voltaire, in disgust, made a theatre in his own house, where amongst the guests were D'Alembert, Diderot, Marmontel. The King of Prussia now beckoned him to Berlin, whither he went in 1750, piqued by Frederick's praise of a young poet, D' Arnaud, whom Voltaire had helped ; indeed, to Voltaire he owed his intro duction to the wily King. Frederick at last " owned " Voltaire ; loaded him with honours, pension, and decoration, and gave him the run of his palaces. He was the sought-after of Berlin. He supped with the King at those brilliant suppers at which both men shone amidst the wits. He lived in the light. Again the black cloud came to his fortune. He got entangled over an ugly money business with a low-class Berlin trafficker in jewels, one Hirsch. Frederick was furious, and wrote a furious letter to Voltaire, of whose conduct he spoke as that of " a rogue trying to cheat a pick-pocket." Voltaire, frightened, made his peace, and the two men were soon on the old footing ; but the King was henceforth ever ready to 126 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. listen to evil of the man. Gibes at each other's expense were repeated to each. Voltaire, far from the reach of the French law, published his Siecle de Louis Quatorze — the banned book flowed into France, where its sound good sense, brilliancy, and marvellous impartiality and justice greatly increased his literary standing. He was soon foul of Frederick — with his satires on Maupertuis, a favourite of the King. The two men, wholly without scruple or truth in their dealings with each other, were becoming daily more and more estranged. Voltaire's satire, Doctor Akakia, angered the King, who saw his philosopher Maupertuis ridiculed. Then came Voltaire's abuse ofthe King's privilege to print a Defence of Bolingbroke. The printed copies were burnt by the public hangman in the presence of the King and of Voltaire. Voltaire had, however, sent a copy to be printed at Dresden, where it was also burnt by the public hangman in the next street to Voltaire's lodging. He had decided on departure secretly, for he had converted his Prussian securities into French annuities. On the New Year's Day of 1735 he sent his resignation to the King, who returned it the same afternoon, and so, with bickerings and makings-up — the King drawn to the man, the man only intent on appearing to leave the Court with dignity and honoured — Voltaire and Frederick parted on the 26th of March 1753, never to see each other again. Voltaire stepped into his carriage, without bidding farewell to his friends, and made hot-foot for Leipzig, from the printing-presses of which he was soon breaking his promise to the King with satires upon Maupertuis. But Frederick bided his time quietly, giving orders for Voltaire to be stopped at Frankfort, where indignities unintended by the King were heaped upon him. With Prussia and France closed to him, Voltaire wandered into Alsace, thence into free and republican Switzerland, where he took a summer place, the " Delices," near Geneva, and Monrion near Lausanne for the winter, his niece, Madame Denis, coming to take care of him. At Lausanne, less strict than Geneva, he could run his theatre — and there Gibbon saw him declaim his own lines. xxix A KING OF PRUSSIA 127 In the November of 1755 the world was horror-stricken by the Lisbon earthquake. It set Voltaire to examining his optimistic doctrine of whatever is, is right. He was now seized with a pessi mistic phase. The following year saw war between England and France, and Voltaire was hugely delighted with his loyal friend Richelieu's victory over the English at Minorca — and, to his eternal honour, he procured Richelieu's evidence that the English Admiral had done the best he could, and sent it to Byng to save him from the death that England demanded, which, though it did not save Byng, gratified the doomed man. CHAPTER XXX WHICH HAS TO DO WITH THE STOOPING OF THE GREAT ONES The Pompadour, in her hectic desire to keep the King from being bored — the King qui s'ennuyait — stooped to the very deeps, and besmirched the art of France by calling upon men of genius to descend to the painting of questionable subjects to tickle the jaded fancy of the Well-Beloved. Boucher, amongst others, so stooped. However, he was now at the full tide of his success, and his art was never more prolific in large works. But the note of criticism was changing from praise to ques tionings. Even the friendly critics were using " buts " with their praise. Carping was in the air. The friendly critics, amidst their praise, complain of the heads of Boucher's women being more coquettish than noble. Even the faithful Mercure, bursting into jesting poetry, lets fly the neat shaft that his shepherdesses, with their pompons and falbalas, look as if they had come into his pastorals from the Opera, and would be off again thereto very soon to their dancing and the footlights. The writing of the philosophers was doing its work. A new France was being born. Troublous days were setting in for Louis, for Paris, for all France. Louis got foul of his Parliaments. The scandalous mis- government of the Pompadour seriously damaged the nation's resources. The tax of 1749, of a twentieth part upon all incomes, set the clergy by the ears, and the Jesuits retaliated by persecuting the Jansenists, refusing them the Sacraments unless they confessed adherence to the bull " Unigenitus." The Parliaments promptly flung 128 XXIII MADAME MASSE BY LA TOUR {At St. Quentin) ch. xxx STOOPING OF THE GREAT ONES 129 themselves at the throats of the clergy. Louis played the one against the other. The school of philosophers grew more daring, with freedom of the people for their very breath — dangerous to King and aristocracy and clergy alike, and firmly planted amongst the people, plotting the overthrow of outworn tyrannies. Lenormant de Tournehem died suddenly on the 19th of November 175 1 ; the Pompadour promptly had appointed in his place her brother, Abel Poisson de Vandieres, as Director-General of Buildings, Houses, Castles, Parks, Gardens, Arts, and Factories of the King, at the age of twenty-five. He was a shy, handsome youth, a gentleman, and an honour able one, whom the King liked well, calling him "little brother," and against whom his sister had but one complaint — that he was devoid of the braggart insolence and the effrontery of the courtiers of the day. He brought to his office an exquisite taste, a loyal nature, and remarkable abilities. No man did more for the advance ment of art in his day than the Pompadour's " little brother." Almost immediately he procured a pension for Boucher, and the coveted apartments at the Louvre, the goal of all successful painters. But Grimm, " the friend of the philosophers," was now attacking with severity " this painter of fans," finding his colour " detestable," his pictures damned by comparison with his neigh bour van Loo, his rose-tints " exasperating," his design " bad," his figures but puppets, and his " two pictures of the lowest rank at the Salon." The amount of work produced by Boucher at this time was prodigious. To do it he had to be up and bustling betimes. Reynolds, passing through Paris, went to visit him, and found him at work upon a huge canvas, for which he was using "neither sketch nor models of any kind." He answered Reynolds's surprise by telling him that he had considered the model as necessary during his youth, until he had completed his study of art, but that he had not used one for a long time past. He was rushing his work, relying on his memory, ceasing to s 130 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. be a student of life, becoming the maker of a convention. He soon had no time to study Nature or life. His vision began to dull, his hand to hesitate, his imagination to falter. He had reached the top of the hill : he must descend the other side. It was the moment of his decline. Boucher begins to grow old. Louis Quinze, and the France of Louis Quinze, also. The quarrel between priests and Parliaments was now at its bitterest. Louis banished Parliaments and established a Royal Chamber. The writing on the wall does not make for ease of mind to Louis, nor to his France. Atop of all comes an ugly scuffle on the American frontiers of New England — one May morning an English force under a young English major, a dogged fellow of the name of Washington, from down Virginia way, cuts to pieces a French command. The resulting attack and defeat and surrender of Washington requires money, and the Pompadour has not money-making ways. In Paris the people are ablaze with anger, not against the King's enemies, but against the King's majesty. A peace is patched between King and people ; the Parlia ment is recalled, enters Paris in triumph, grimly enough on the day that to the Dauphin is born a second son, who is to succeed to the throne of France as Louis the Sixteenth. Thereafter, a backstairs intrigue almost dislodges the Pompadour from the seat of the mighty. D'Argenson, with the Pompadour's treacherous cousin, Madame d'Estrades, throws the beautiful and youthful Madame de Choiseul-Romanet, not wholly unwilling, into the King's way, to lure his fancy from the Pompadour. The King writes her a letter. The girl consults her kinsman, the Comte de Stainville, of the Maurepas faction, a bitter enemy to the Pompadour. De Stainville, wounded in his pride that a kinswoman of his should be offered to the King, goes to the Pompadour, exposes the plot, becomes her ally, and soon her chief guide in affairs of State. The alliance came near to saving France. The Pompadour never forgot this peril. She saw the hint of xxx STOOPING OF THE GREAT ONES 131 her personal attractions beginning to wane upon the King. She knew full well that her force and decision of character were now alone the bond that held her to him, whose indolent will was thereby freed from the need of action and decision. She decided to keep her supremacy by forestalling a rival in future. She had stooped before ; she now stooped to the basest shift of all — to that which must be the bitterest move a woman has to make to hold the allegiance of a man. She supplied the King with mistresses of the lowest class, who could never come into the intellectual necessity of the King, nor become the prop to his will and ease of days as she was. She started, for the King's pleasure, the beautiful retreat of her notorious pavilion in the Parc-aux-cerfs, near Ver sailles, which she made into a seraglio of beautiful young women, each a spy upon the other, each dependent on her bounty, and thus secured herself against secret rivals. The French Court, already a severe tax upon public opinion, became an outrage upon public decency. Public contempt grew, and exaggeration. From hence forth the title " Well-Beloved " lost its reality in satirical use, and took on a comic meaning. In 1754 the Pompadour's amiable "little brother," Abel Poisson de Vandieres, was created Marquis de Marigny. In the following year Chardin was appointed Treasurer to the Royal Academy, and to the somewhat thankless office of " arranger of pictures at the Salons." It was a tribute to his high honour and integrity, for the money affairs of the Academy were in a shocking state. Henceforth his own works were shown to their least advantage, for Chardin had the hanging of them. The fact is also proof that he and La Tour had nothing to do with the abasement of Perronneau five years before. Eighteen months afterwards he was awarded the great prize of the Academy — apartments at the Louvre. Here he was thoroughly happy, with Tocque, Lemoyne the sculptor, Restout, Boucher, La Tour, Lepicie, and Cochin for his comrades. Leading his monotonous life of heavy labour in his art, he was harassed only 132 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xxx by the troubles which his young and brilliant son now began to bring into his life. Like the son of so many great men, he was a conceited, arrogant, self-willed, promising lad, full of dreams that never became a reality — troubling others, himself perhaps most of all. The place and date of the young man's death are uncertain, but he is strongly suspected of suicide. His death broke his father down. XXIV MADAME CHEVOTET BY PERRONNEAU {At Orleans Museum) '.>!!! CHAPTER XXXI WHICH CONTAINS STILL ANOTHER HINT OF THE MARTYRDOM OF HAVING ONE'S PORTRAIT MADE BY GENIUS Perronneau had now clearly a wide circle of admirers, and a large number of sitters. To the Salon of 1751 he sent the pastel portraits of the Comte de Bonneval ; M. Ruelle, first alderman ; Madame Ruelle ; M. et Madame (Fontaine), saddler to the King ; Madame de Saint ; Mademoiselle Silanie ; Mademoiselle ; M. Desfriches ; Mademoiselle Rosaline ; and two portraits of unknown men, as well as that of Madame de Ruisseau, painted in oils. In this year he also painted the portraits of the architect Chevotet and His Wife. In 1753, the Academy was still without the two "portraits- of-reception," ordered at Perronneau's admittance seven years before, without which the artist could not proceed to the full degree of " painter to the King." He would appear to have been charged with his fault ; but his excuses were accepted by the Academy with indulgence, as were those of the defaulting Verbeckt, Adam the younger, and Falconet. A last delay of six months, however, was allowed on the 23rd of February 1753 ; and Perronneau kept his promise — the portraits of Oudry and Adam the Elder hang in the Louvre to bear witness to it. At their presentation to the Academy they called forth loud applause. He sent them to the Salon, together with that of Julien le Roy, the King's watchmaker ; the Princesse de Conde (Elizabeth de Rohan- Soubise), who was married this year at sixteen, and died at twenty-three in 1760 ; Mylord de Huntington ; Madame Lemoyne, wife of the sculptor ; and Madame . 133 134 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. The well-known portrait of Pierre Bouguer, of the Academy of Science, is dated this year, though it did not go to the Salon. It was his engraving of this picture by Miger in 1779 that was to be that engraver's reception-piece on his election to the Academy. Perronneau was at the height of his success. The tongues of the critics had ceased from venom and from belittlings ; orders were flowing in, and so bright was his prospect that he took to himself a wife. At the church of Saint Barthelemy, Perronneau was married on the 9th of November 1754 to one of the daughters of Louis Francois Aubert, the painter of miniatures — painter also, occasionally, of portraits in pastel. That Perronneau was now an artist of consider able repute and position is further made clear by the names of the eminent people who make up the long list of witnesses who sign to his marriage contract. Another certificate, if not so formal an one, gives us an insight into his habits about this same time ; from the yearly list published by the Royal Academy, we have abundant proof as to Perronneau's being unable to abide in one place for any length of time, even when in Paris — he flits to this street and to that, each Salon sees him giving a new address. To the Salon of 1755 Perronneau sent eighteen portraits, of which seven are given no names ; but some of the others are known to have been the Madame Vanville holding a bouquet of barbeaux ; the Prince Charles of Lorraine, Governor of the Low Countries ; the Princess Charlotte of Lorraine, his sister, Abbesse of Remiremont and Mons ; the Daniel Jousse, juriconsulte, in oils ; and the Pierre Poissonier, a doctor. Poor Francois Aubert, Perronneau's father-in-law, did not long enjoy the honour of the title of Painter in Enamel to the King ; he died on the 20th of October of this same year. In 1756 we find Perronneau at Bordeaux, in which neighbour hood are to-day to be found many of the finest of his pastel portraits. To the Salon of 1757 he sent Several Portraits under the same Number, the stupid title leaving us somewhat empty. About this xxv PIERRE BOUQUIER BY PERRONNEAU {Louvre) xxxi PORTRAIT MADE BY GENIUS 135 time it was, at any rate, that he finished the portrait of Cochin, that rare friend to artists, and one of the poet Robbe de Beauveset. This was the Robbe who carried on a close correspondence with his uncle, the artist Desfriches, to the end of his days — that correspondence from which was lately extracted by Georges d'Heylli the valuable details that concerned the trial and execution of Damiens, who had attempted the life of the King. But d'Heylli missed some interesting gossip therein concerning Perronneau written by the dandified poet, who penned, by the way, an excellent letter. "Ah !" writes poet Robbe de Beauveset in this year of 1757 — " Ah ! my dear uncle, what a cruel calling to be a lay-figure ! This devil of a Perronneau demanded yesterday of my complacency that I should saddle myself with the silk cassock of Monsieur Cochin, who, during the time, was at the wedding of Mademoiselle Jombert, to which, by the way, I had not been asked ; he demanded, I say, that I should hold the left arm out, a pencil-holder between thumb and forefinger, and that I should so remain in this weary attitude the entire day. . . . Never Spartan pushed patience so far." The poet clearly suffered, and waggishly chides Perronneau for treating a poet's carcase like a basketwork mannikin. He slyly asks his uncle to tell Cochin that this fellow Perronneau " has the voice of Jacob, but his hands are the hands of Esau." And he ends by saying that, the painting done, it ought to be set up as the picture of the new saint, and, being translated to the Museum, should be exposed for a month to the public veneration. . . . Poet Robbe de Beauveset seems to have risked a second martyrdom ; for, in 1758, he again writes of his sufferings as the " mannikin " to a new portrait by Perronneau. " The sitting of Saturday fatigued me cruelly ; Perronneau kept me on my legs half the entire day, always in the same attitude. He would not even let me blow my nose. . . . The frame and the glass are, I think, a matter of 30 or 36 livres ; it is not right that Perronneau's pocket should be drawn upon for them. I shall make him an advance." CHAPTER XXXII WHEREIN WE MEET MADAME LA MARQUISE DE POMPADOUR IN STRANGE COMPANY The reign of Louis the Fifteenth was the reign of women ; it is for this very reason that, unfairly enough, the reign of women has left a tradition of the weaknesses of a nation in which women are supreme — for the women must be weighed by the times that bred them, and measured by the ladder by which they climbed to power. The men about the Court scarce come out of the mid-seventeen-hundreds with more lofty ideals or higher achievement than the women. Many queens ruled over France in the years of Louis the Well-Beloved ; but above them all sits enthroned the strange woman who goes down the centuries as the Marquise de Pompadour. So dominant was she that it is she, and not her lord, who represents her age. But before we condemn the rule of women by setting the Pompadour at the bar of judgment, let us remember always that Empress of Austria who stands out in such fiery contrast. However, there, with her high heels upon the neck of France, sat Jane Fish, Marquise de Pompadour. A strange destiny — a strange woman — baffling and difficult of comprehension ; yet, by the superficial mind, so lightly thrust aside to-day as a mere light-o'-love, who held a Sovereign's kingship in thrall within her pretty fingers, and used it wilfully and ill. But light minds have ever slender tongues, and spitting is an easy virtue that is not above becoming a vile habit. She was, when truth is fathomed, perhaps even a worse woman than such slander reputes her, as she was likewise greater ; for, this woman was no such 136 ch.xxxii MADAME POMPADOUR 137 trivial and light thing as the gossips have willed her. Tying a brief label round the neck of a character saves heavy thinking. Yet, hesitate awhile. What a baffling thing that this very woman, the friend of the new philosophy, was just she who was spinning the ruin for France which this same philosophy alone could avert ! Queening it over an age that made the trivial thing its god, gallantry its ambition, this woman was the friend and protector and intimate of great and philosophic minds, and largely the partaker in their philosophic movement that was troubling the age — the friend of men whose words were to send the quickening blood coursing through the life of France, men who were to bring the France that she swayed, and all that that France meant, to the guillotine and the agonies of the Terror ! She it was who protected the arts and watched over the welfare of the artists. She gave to France her fashions in the crafts, in the furnishments of the home. Yet she exercised a cold-blooded tyranny over the land which sent the people hurrying, scowling and cursing her, to the awful revenge of the years of the Revolution. She used the lettre de cachet with a wilful hate that never knew a moment of remorse ; her ears never bent in mercy to a cry from the Bastille. Her hate knew no faltering. She pillaged the land to build up her state and her magnificence. Her will was of iron ; her self-control a calculated and hellish wonder — she, the pretty syllables of whose romantic name stand for the triviality and frivolous ways of a mere light-o'-love of an indolent and wayward king ! The women of fashion took chiefest pride in assembling together the wits of their day. And she, the leading spirit of them all, who gave a pretty name to a pretty age, had been the friend of Voltaire, of Diderot, of Jean Jacques Rousseau, of Boucher, of La Tour, and their like. All had met in her rooms, as they had also been a part of that galaxy of the talents that circled round the brilliant women of the time, women of all classes and conditions, so that they but shone above their fellows — princesses, courtesans, wives of city merchants ; women not only interested T 138 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. in the arts and in letters, but skilled in science, in metaphysics, in astronomy, politics, affairs. And it is perhaps not the smallest part of the wonder that a society wholly given up to scepticism, and teeming with men of knowledge, met women on an equal intellectual footing, and without thought of raillery or condescension in the meeting. Madame d'Holbach, Madame Geoffrin, Madame d'fipinay were not only the pleasant hostesses of their guests, but their intellectual comrades. The Pompadour graved with her own hand the ornaments to the Encyclopedia. She caused her brother, created Marquis de Marigny, to be made the Minister of the Arts ; and, with him, controlled the royal favour, and led it to large enterprise, in the protection and encouragement of the artists. Reigning as queen of the arts, she had the ambition to be painted by the kings of portraiture of her time ; thus van Loo and Boucher and La Tour were marked out for her favour. La Tour's wilful nature was not so easily won by the splendid flattery as was Boucher's. Others came at the call ; La Tour with his pastels needed to be won after lengthier siege. The fantastic comedy had to be gone through, with the great courtesan as victim. The very Dauphiness herself had not escaped — why should the mistress ? Marigny, the Pompadour's " little brother," conveyed the great mistress's desire with tactful skill. The letters of the Pompadour's " little brother " prove that the trapping of La Tour was no easy affair. They open in 1750. The siege begins. The first overtures to the artist were repulsed with loss. Even the kindly and tactful Marigny inclines to loss of temper at the insolent reply of La Tour : " Tell Madame that I am not going to paint before the whole town " ; for, he writes to his sister that " there is nothing to be done with La Tour ; his folly increases from day to day." However, on Marigny's return from Italy, he tactfully persuaded La Tour towards the business ; and La Tour made a couple of sketches. But it is the 26th of February 1752 before Marigny xxxn MADAME POMPADOUR 139 presses him to the fulfilment of his promise, writing to ask him " when he intends to put upon the easel the picture for which he has made the studies ? " It is July by the time he has made a beginning, when, off he flies again, sending a hundred excuses for not finishing it ; he writes that he is a prey to despondency, to a depression that he fears will bring on a fever ; he has to go to the country to " see if the air will do him good " ; to rest, to go to bed, to get out of the state of vexation over an accident which has caused damage to his pastel sketches of the Pompadour, of which he accuses Marigny of being the " innocent cause " ; a thousand and one excuses. Marigny replied with some temper, appealing to him to remember that to his sister he owes his recognition, and to himself much friendship. The Pompadour herself writes, begs him " to finish what he has so well begun " ; and promises him that " if he will come to-morrow she will be free, and with as few people as he wishes " ; and, she ends wheedlingly, " you know, monsieur, the esteem that I have for you and for your admirable gifts." Conquered by such splendid persistency, La Tour yielded, and returned to Versailles. The sweetness of disposition of the " little brother," and his good breeding, at last won over the whimsical Academician. Marigny was possessed of a tact that was of wondrous value in his dealings with artists, and that stood him in good stead with La Tour. After months of siege, then, the artist agreed to the terms of surrender ; but the King's favourite needed all her dogged patience in the pursuit of an object in order to get her way with La Tour. He laid down as a condition that he should not be interrupted during the sittings by any one. The Pompadour agreed to the terms of his surrender, laid down with the arro gance of a conqueror. La Tour arrived on the appointed day, and prepared himself for work. As his habit was, he took off the buckles of his shoes, his garters, and his neckerchief ; hung up his wig on the Ho THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. royal candlesticks ; pulled a cap over his head ; and, having made himself free and easy, as if in the comfort of his studio, he was beginning to sketch in the portrait of his sitter when the King came into the room, and showed frank astonishment at the costume of the painter. The Pompadour smiled. La Tour made a grimace ; rose from his easel ; took off his cap, and said sharply : " You promised me, Madame, that your door would be locked." The King begged him to stay. " It is impossible for me to obey your Majesty," said La Tour ; " I will come back when Madame is alone." Taking up his wig, his necktie, his garters, and his hat, he carried them off into another room ; dressed ; and departed. And he did not come back for several days, until the Pompadour convinced him that for the future he would not be interrupted again in his work. The King should have known his man. Before, when La Tour was making the sketches of the Pompadour, the King had entered with one or two others. La Tour happened to be painting her at the time that the English fleet was threatening the French at sea. The King fell a-talking to the Pompadour of the buildings that he was about to raise, planning with complaisance what he ought to build, when, all of a sudden, La Tour, pretending to speak to himself, said, "That's fine ; but ships would be better." The King reddened, and left the room. But everything seemed to conspire in hindering the making of this great portrait of the Pompadour — her health broke down, and it needed the help of all her medicaments, and of the aids to beauty of the perfume-shop, to preserve her fading charms. On the 14th of June 1754 her only daughter Alexandrine died — then on the 25th of the same month her father. It was only after three years of misunder standings innumerable and of misfortunes that the portrait stood completed, and made its appearance at the Salon of 1755. This was the largest as well as most ambitious pastel that La Tour painted. It covered a space five and a half feet high by four feet wide. It hangs in the Louvre to-day, the masterpiece by which XXVI LA POMPADOUR BY LA TOUR {Louvre) xxxn MADAME POMPADOUR 141 he is most widely known to fame, though he created others that are greater achievements in pastels. The charm of the woman seems to have appealed to him ; and he strove with all his will to create a masterpiece of the "king's morsel." The picture was the sensation of Paris. It produced a wordy warfare in pamphlets and printed " Letters," as was the fashion of the day ; and bitter critical strife raged about it. The likeness, said many, was far to seek. Here we have the Pompadour as the reigning deity over the world of art and letters — she is at the height of her power at Court, at the full blossom of her womanhood. Seated ; a piece of music in her slender fingers, and the guitar on the chair behind her, tell of her love of music — that music of which she was herself so accomplished a mistress. Her arm rests on a volume that lies upon the marble table- top on which are a sphere and books, the titles of which show her interest in the Encyclopedia, the Henriade, the Esprit des Ms, the Pastor- fido, and her volume on Pierres gravies, those engraved gems of which she was so ardent and extravagant a collecter. A print shows her- proud signature Pompadour sculpsit. Engravings and drawings on the floor betray the tastes of the woman who founded the porcelain works at Sevres. And with what astounding skill the artist has set down for us the cultured and beautiful woman ; and with what rare dignity and charm ! She who was queen in act and in all but title, whose firm lips and set smile disguised a colossal will that swallowed indignities and humiliations with calculated affability, but never forgot or forgave them ; whose careless ease knew no real sweetness of disposition ; whose hard eyes never forgot an insult, and whose serene memory never failed to punish it. The face of that woman of whom a contemporary has said that " will rather than nature had modelled her features." The Pompadour was not at an end of her troubles with her portrait the day that La Tour packed up his pastels and put on his neckerchief and shoe-buckles and garters, took down his wig from off 142 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch.xxxii the royal candlesticks and set it upon his head in her presence for the last time. He fought her bitterly for the price of it, which he set down at 48,000 livres. She sent him the half of that sum — a large fee for those days — which Chardin, with kindly tact, persuaded him to accept, pointing out to him that each of the pictures at Notre Dame had only been valued at three hundred livres, even when by the most illustrious painters. La Tour gave in to his friend's advice ; but he was wounded, and railed abroad against the Pompadour and at the degradation of painters. The affair seems to have left an acrid memory behind it. Of the sketches for the head of the favourite that he made for this portrait, no doubt the two that now hang upon the walls of the Museum at Saint Quentin are the chief. The head attributed to the Du Barry is certainly a sketch for the Pompadour. The year after La Tour showed the portrait of the Pompadour at the Salon, Boucher turned from his tapestries and multitudinous activities to paint her also (1756). PERE EMMANUEL By De La Tour at St. Quentin CHAPTER XXXIII WHEREIN THE CURTAIN RINGS UP AND DISCOVERS A BEAUTIFUL SINGER The theatre was to bring into La Tour's life an influence very different from that of the dancer Camargo in the fascinating person of the beautiful singer whose name will endure as long as the artist's fame — Mademoiselle Fel. At the Salon of 1757 there appears in the catalogue against the name of La Tour the modest phrase, Several Heads in pastel under the same Number. The recorded gossip of the Mercure newspaper tells us whose were those heads — Monet ; Theodore Tronchin ; P. Emmanuel, a capuchin of Saint Quentin who was the early confessor of La Tour ; and Mademoiselle Fel. Born in far Bordeaux on the 26th ofthe October ofthe year 171 3, a month after the bull " Unigenitus " was thrust upon the statute books of the France of the Grand Monarque's last years, Marie Fel was two years old when the Regent Orleans seized the helm of the State — the artist Maurice Quentin de La Tour running about the streets of Saint Quentin a boy of nine. The little girl-child Marie Fel, daughter of an organist in Bordeaux, seemed born in a world as far remote from the gay life of Paris as was the lad of Saint Quentin. But she was dowered with an exquisite voice, as well as rare beauty, that were to make her name ring over Paris as a queen of song. It was in 1734 that the girl of twenty-one, after her first essay at a concert, burst upon the town at the Opera. Who taught her to sing, whence she came to the polished boards of Paris, we shall never know. But she came ; and in all the freshness of her charm and i43 144 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. beauty ; and forthwith took the town by storm. For twenty-four years (until 1758) she sang at this theatre. La Tour was thirty when she came ; but when he first met the beautiful girl, when she became his mistress, who shall tell? She was to play the chief part in the comedy of his life, and to be his kindly and generous comrade to the last sad day of his old age, until the dragging death of madness came to him. Yet we may guess pretty shrewdly of the year in which they met. It is not far amiss to say that the pastel sketch of the beautiful face that smiles from the walls of the Museum at Saint Quentin was drawn by her lover long before he painted her in the vanished portrait that he sent to the Salon in her forty-fourth year. She stepped before the footlights of Paris at twenty- one, in La Tour's thirtieth year ; and this sketch shows her at the height of her young womanhood and beauty. Whereas La Tour painted her picture and sent it to the Salon when she was over forty, some two or three years after the Camargo ceased from dancing and left her career for ever. Mademoiselle Fel, so runs the dry recorded entry in the books of the Opera House, "joined the Opera in November 1734 at 1050 livres salary, without gratuities. Gave notice to leave 18 July 1735 and left the said day. Returned the following Easter 1736 at a salary of 1200 livres with 300 livres in gratuities — left the Opera in 1759 (8 ?), her fees as leading lady having risen to 3000 livres salary with 1000 livres in gratuities. Has been placed upon a pension of 1000 livres, with 500 livres in gratuities, a year." That she sang to Paris until she was forty-five, appearing on the boards for twenty-five years, proves her to have been a rare favourite. But this sketch of her at Saint Quentin was certainly not done as late as two years before her retirement. A hundred and sixty pounds a year reads as scant fortune for the leading singer in Opera to receive at forty-five at the end of a great career to-day ! but vast riches were not for the writer, the poet, the singer, musician, or painter in the seventeen-hundreds, unless — but we are coming to that. The grim secret records of Meunier, the inspector of police, xxxiii A BEAUTIFUL SINGER 145 lapse, in spite of brutal frankness, into a touch of scandal that suggests romance. Thus runs the dry comment, bereft of titles and courtesies : " Fel — a little young woman, but great musician, singing Italian exceedingly well. She is not at all pretty ; however, they say she is the mistress of M. le due de Rochechouart." A girl who had the ambition to become a singer at the Opera in those days had small chance of making her appearance except " under the protection " of powerful personages. Now it so came about that she created the part of Colette in the Devin de Village, in which part she roused the passionate love of Cahusac, and stirred a while the calm soul of Grimm. And in 1754, her thirty-eighth year, she sang at the Tuilleries in Mondonville's Daphnis and Alcindor. The authors of these two operas were the friends of La Tour ; and in view of the singer's relations with Jean Jacques Rousseau, and of La Tour's frequenting the house of the Mondonvilles, it is clear that the artist was in closer friendship with the idol of Paris than distant worship across the footlights. Long before this time the brilliant woman took possession of his heart and thenceforth reigned over his affections — long years before he showed the famous portrait of Mademoiselle Fel at the Salon. She lived in the Rue Saint Thomas du Louvre, but a couple of doors from the official lodgings of La Tour ; and later she had a country-house at Chaillot, where La Tour went to live after he gave up his country-house (which he had taken for two years, at Auteuil) to Madame Helvetius in 1772. Mademoiselle Fel sang at concerts after she left the Opera, until 1778, her sixty-third year — her gifts, then, to find a large public at that age, must have been of no mean order. Scandal did not spare her. She is reputed to have had ambitions upon the King. Cahusac went mad for love of her and died in his lodgings a broken man. In the Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau you shall find even so staid and worldly-wise a person as Grimm making a fool of himself about the beauty. We have the picture of Grimm, suddenly falling in love with her. On being repulsed, 146 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. he takes the affair tragically seriously — he decides that it must be the death of him ; he falls into a strange malady, passing his days and nights in a lethargic state. But his despair does not melt the heart of the actress. She has played too .many comedy parts on the stage. It is necessary to carry off Grimm to the house of the Castries. There, every morning he goes into the garden to nurse his grief and to weep — whilst in view of the house he holds his handkerchief to his eyes and bathes it in tears ; he rises at last and, strolling into a sidewalk, where he thinks he is not seen, he puts his handkerchief into his pocket, and pulls out a book ! However, the " little young woman, not at all pretty " to the eyes of the police, comes to make a great noise in the world of Paris as one of the leading beauties, and all the young bloods are toasting her. Certainly in pastel she shows a winsome countenance, with large oriental eyes ; and of the glory of her hair she was not innocent, for she wore it unpowdered. La Tour forced the suggestion of the beauty of the harem by placing a gauze upon her head, worn like the little cap of Eastern women — there is the touch of the actress in the pose. How alive it is, that sketch of the beautiful head ! The comradeship of this man and woman, so opposite in temperament, was a close and happy affair. La Tour, restless, nervous, easily irritated or roused to discontent with others, discontented with his own achievement, grasping for * money, prodigal enough when he got it, touchy, full of his own importance, jealous of his place in art, gluttonous of praise, detesting criticism, hotly occupied with the social ideals of his age, of a quick tongue, rapier-like to resent indignities and ever ready to take offence or pick a quarrel — to such a man, only too prone to suffer wounds, the gentle and sweet disposition of his mistress came as a soothing balm. Her tact and gentle ways calmed the man's violent temper and hot brain, soothed the irritation of his nerves, and smoothed away his resent ments. She gently led his wayward spirit towards peace. The tender care and affection that she lavished upon him, from the time she joined her life to his, was never rebuffed by the vagaries of xxvii mademoiselle fel BY LA TOUR {At St. Quentin) xxxiii A BEAUTIFUL SINGER 147 her lover ; her service knew no wounds from the wilfulnesses of his fantastic moods. He loved her to the end, even when reason had left him and the lamp of his plagued soul was gone out. She was accepted as his amie by public opinion, by his kins folk, and by all who knew them — even at Saint Quentin, proud of its great son, with its straight-laced provincial code of conduct, she was accepted as his lover. Nay, did not the Chevalier de La Tour, brother of Maurice, correspond with her in kinsmanlike fashion ? She kisses her pretty fingers to Saint Quentin ; sends her compliments to the Abbe and her many friends there. CHAPTER XXXIV WHEREIN THE NEW THOUGHT COMES NEAR TO STABBING THE KING UNDER THE FIFTH RIB ; AND CONFUSES THE FASHIONS Meanwhile, Church and Parliament were at open warfare. Louis had need of Parliament's support — hostilities at sea with the English fleet made war inevitable. Support was to come from the most unlikely place. Maria Theresa, the astute Empress of Austria, Queen of a people that had been for two hundred years the implacable enemy of France, wrote with her own hand the famous letter which addressed Louis' mistress as " ma cousine," and won thereby the close alliance of France to the May-Day Treaty of Versailles in 1756. A treacherous clerk betrayed the secret compact to Frederick of Prussia's spies — who at once seized Leipzig and Dresden, and set astir the mighty Seven Years' War. Louis, alarmed by the daring of his Parliament, went over to the Church ; fell foul of the Parliament men again, who withdrew in silence. Thus was Paris in a state close upon revolt when poor foolish Damiens, reckless of his own life, stabbed the King with a pen-knife under the fifth rib as Louis stepped into his carriage at Versailles. The Pompadour, in tears and terror, got a-packing her belongings ; but had no need to go. The wound was slight. The King recovered. In the people's sympathy for the wounded man that followed, and which even the brutal tortures inflicted upon the racked body of the futile Damiens could not check, Louis made a bid for his lost nickname of "Well-Beloved" by restoring the bishops and recalling the Parliament, though each party knew 148 ch. xxxiv THE NEW THOUGHT 149 it could not be peace for long. The mighty flood of great events was aflow, bewildering the thinking onlooker. The news of Prussia's successes was mitigated by England's loss of Hanover and Brunswick, of Minorca and Port Mahon — England venting her wrath upon her Admiral Byng in Portsmouth Harbour but increased that mitigation. Frederick's defeat in 1757 saw the French, Russian, Austrian, and Swedish legions swarming into Prussian territories, and all looked smiling for Louis, when Frederick, turning like a lion at bay, with dauntless courage and consummate genius fell upon their hosts and overthrew them on a November day at Rosbach, and again in December at Leuthen. On the top of terrible reverses came the rise of one of England's men of supreme genius, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Defeat became the fashion for France. In the midst of disasters, the Pompadour persuaded the King to send for De Stainville. He was called from the Embassy at Vienna and made Prime Minister. She had at last found a man who was loyal to his word. De Stainville was created Due de Choiseul in the December of 1758. Choiseul had as ally one of the most astute and subtlest minds in eighteenth-century France — his sister Beatrice, the famous Duchesse de Grammont. The King had at last by his side a born leader of men. Choiseul brought back to the King his dignity. He and his great sister came near to saving France. Choiseul became the Public Opinion of the nation. He saw with clear eyes that France's most dangerous enemy was England. He foretold the loss of the American colonies to England from England's own folly. He founded his strength on Parliament and the philosophers. He packed important offices in the State with his own kin or friends whose alliance he could trust. He became a national hero. He could do no wrong. Choiseul came to power in 1758, and stemmed for a while the tide of disaster to France. He prepared for the invasion of England in the following spring of 1759 ; but the union of the French fleets 150 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. was destroyed by Boscawen's victory over the Southern French squadrons off Lagos. August brought news of the disaster of Minden to French arms on land, and November saw Hawke whip the Northern French ships off the sea hard by Belle-Isle (1759). In the distant Americas the fortunes of war had passed to England — on a night of September (1759) Wolfe climbed the Heights of Abraham, to the overthrow of Montcalm at Quebec that lost Canada to the French, who surrendered in the September a year later (1760). The fiasco of Carrickfergus in the early part of 1760 ended the French hopes at sea. Choiseul, with calm courage, set himself to check the disasters that threatened France on every hand. He bound France and Spain together in the offensive and defensive alliance of the Family Compact. He checked Frederick of Prussia. But the English tide of victory swept on. They took from France the prize of Havannah and the rich West Indies. The Parliament men took courage. Philosophy, with one of its men in power, spoke out now with no uncertain voice. All France was listening. Boucher, lord of the world of art, painter of pastorals and Venus-pieces, director of the mode, stood bewildered at the coming vogue. Diderot was now attacking him with bitterness, deploring that such talents and great gifts as were his should be so debauched in order to win the applause of little men. Boucher, spite of spurts of the old magic, was rapidly approach ing his premature decay. He had burnt the candle at both ends. He had voiced the fashion of his age. The new thought meant nothing to him. Roslin, the Swede, has left us the picture of the man at this time, well known from the engravings. He is already old ; sadness is settling upon him ; old age creeps over the shrewd kindly features ; the eye has lost something of its fire ; already the crow's-feet are printing the footmarks of time ; there is a world-weariness in the xxxiv THE NEW THOUGHT 151 attitude as he looks out upon us over his shoulder, his right arm over the chair's back ; feebleness has come upon his body, but the hand — the long, strong, sensitive hand — holds firmly in its slender nervous fingers still the holder with its red chalk therein — they were to hold it and keep their cunning to the last hour. A different man this from the gay fellow whom the pastels of Lundberg limned ! In 1762 sickness fell upon him, and thenceforth left him small respite. Yet his greed for work held him on. Diderot was now pouring forth rank abuse upon all that Boucher wrought — abuse that shows the nakedness of his own soul rather than the faults of the great painter. He accuses him of leading astray all the younger men to the painting of prettinesses, wearying the world with garlanded infants and the rest of the bag of tricks. Boucher could not wholly ignore the change that was taking place. The ideas of the philosophers were penetrating public taste. The Man of Feeling was walking abroad. " The rich do not view with pleasure the gross and suffering nature of our peasants ; it must recall to some of them the image of evils of which they are the cause." It sounds everywhere. France is echoing it from corner to corner. They are beginning to speak of the great antique days — of the simplicity of ancient Greece and of old Republican Rome. Leroy, the pupil of Blondel, had published in 1758 his Ruins of the most beautiful Monuments of Greece ; the writings of Winckelmann were becoming known to the French public — indeed, in 1766 a miserable translation was published of his Art of Antiquity. Gabriel was at the same time giving a telling example of an intelligent return to simple and harmonious lines, that was soon in its turn to be overdone by too ardent and narrow disciples. Vien was also heading towards the coming reaction. Fickle fashion was about to turn her back upon Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses and leafy bosqtiets ; and to take ud her abode awhile with heroes and amongst picturesque ruins. iS2 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch.xxxiv Boucher realised in some vague fashion that there was a new thought abroad in the land ; and with wonted generosity, and liberal heart, and keen foresight for the welfare of younger artists, he sent to Vien in 1764 his young kinsman, who was to become an illustrious painter and one of the leaders of the Revolution as Jacques Louis David. XXVIII MARIE JOSEPHE DE SAXE BY LA TOUR {Louvre) CHAPTER XXXV WHICH HAS TO DO WITH THE PASSING OF THE POMPADOUR At the Salon of 1759, La Tour's name appears in the list against his often used phrase of several portraits ; but, according to Diderot, he sent nothing, owing to his having been refused the places for which he asked ; and the silence of the critics certainly confirms the statement. In 1760 Death began to be busy amongst La Tour's immediate kin, and the man felt it severely, for he was always closely bound to his own blood. He lost the elder of his two brothers, Adrien Francois. And in the September of the same year his elder step brother, Honore Adrien, also died. Their loss drew the aging painter closer to his brother Charles and to his remaining step-brother the army officer, Jean Francois de La Tour. In the following year (1761), of his several portraits sent to the Salon, one discovers from the critics of the day that of the number were his Chardin ; the Du Pouche ; the Philippe, Director of Aides ; the Comte de Lusace ; the M. de Cribillon {pere), the tragic poet in old age, of which the superb sketch is to be seen at Saint Quentin ; the Due de Bourgogne, who died in the April of this year, scarce ten years old — his mother was the Dauphiness Marie Josephe de Saxe, the " second Dauphiness," the large pastel sketch of whom, with this little son, the Due de Bourgogne, also hangs at Saint Quentin, the child's early death making his second brother Louis, Due de Berry, heir to the throne, to which he was to succeed as Louis the Sixteenth ; the Madame la Dauphine (No. 2), Marie Josephe de Saxe ; the M. Bertin, financier, and M. Laideguive, the notary. iS3 x 154 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. Diderot bears witness that these greatly added to La Tour's reputation. In this his fifty-seventh year an action was brought at law by the banker Salles and his wife against La Tour and his contractor-brother Charles, wherein the legal document discloses in blunt fashion that La Tour's responsibility runs into figures amounting to 50,000 livres — a sum that proves La Tour's fortune to have been made outside the monies received for pictures, in spite of the high prices he exacted from his richer clients, though these prices were quite above the fees usually paid in his day. In 1762 La Tour painted, at the royal command, a portrait ofthe Due de Berry, whom we shall know afterwards as the ill-fated Louis the Sixteenth ; and to the Salon which opened in the following year (1763) he sent this portrait ofthe future King ; the Dauphin (No. 3) ; the Dauphine (No. 3 — Tourneux calls it No. 2) ; the Comte de Provence (afterwards Louis XVIII.) ; Prince Clement de Saxe ; the Princesse Christine de Saxe ; and the sculptor Lemoyne. Choiseul's masterly mind had checked Frederick of Prussia to the north ; and Prussia, exhausted by war, began to speak of peace. The incompetent Bute having come to power in England behind a royal petticoat, was no man of war. France signed the Treaty of Paris on the 10th of February 1763 : — her power in India destroyed ; Canada surrendered, together with near all her American dominions ; her reign in the Caribbean over. Choiseul saw that France must be cleansed from within. France at peace abroad, Choiseul turned to the blotting out of the turbulent order of the Jesuits. This powerful order, successful against the Lutheran and Calvinistic movements throughout France, dominant amongst her clergy, holding the ear of royalty, whom it had governed for three reigns, had an influence upon affairs as vast as it was secret. Its casuistical code of honour had received its first serious blow from the Jansenists ; from the clear phrases and sarcasm of Pascal and Arnauld the company had never wholly recovered. Its vindictive acts against, and quarrels with, the Parliaments, and its galling and XXIX THE DAUPHIN BY LA TOUR {Louvre) xxxv PASSING OF THE POMPADOUR 155 oppressive tyranny, had roused the bitter hatred of the magistracy and of the people throughout the land. The school of sceptic philosophers under Voltaire, Diderot, and D'Alembert — the so-called Encyclopedists — gave them no quarter. Choiseul was their bitterest enemy. He decided that France, to be saved, must first rid herself of the re actionary clergy and of their enmity to the rights of the democracy ; he determined to blot them out, root and branch. The popular party closed up its ranks. Choiseul waited, lynx-eyed. The chance soon came — in strange fashion. And he took it — in as strange fashion. An attempt of the Jesuits to end the Pompadour's scandalous relations with the King was the trivial thing — the match that started the explosion which blew their mighty power to pieces. With all his skill of statecraft, Choiseul leaped to his weapon. In secret concert with the King's powerful favourite, he decided to strike them down. The Society of Jesuits was largely embarked in commerce, its wealth was prodigious. Father Lavalette's great banking concern in the West Indies came crash owing to the war with England — he failed for three millions of French money. The Marseilles creditors claimed that the General of the order was responsible. The French courts decided in their favour. The appeal to Parliament upheld this decision, which meant ruin to the order. Feeling ran high all over France ; and Louis, egged on to it by his astute Minister and by his vindictive mistress, abolished the Society of Jesus from out all France, secularised its members, and seized its property. The sentence was carried out with ruthless venom. Within ten years, in the year that Louis died, Pope Clement XIV. struck the final blow by abolishing the order altogether in his Bull. The Pompadour lived but a very short while to gloat over her triumph. Worn out by her superhuman activities, assailed by debts that threatened her whose wide-grasping hands spent even before she gathered in, she fell ill with a cough that racked her emaciated body. She had to borrow 70,000 livres to pay her way in her sickness. But 156 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch.xxxv she kept her ascendency over the King's will and the supreme power in France to her last hour ; Death found her transacting affairs of State. She died on the 15th of April in 1764, in her forty-second year. And Louis ? Weary of his servitude, he could think of but a heartless epigram to cast after the body of the dead woman as it passed in funeral procession to its last resting-place. However black the sins she sinned, and they were black enough, this calculating and grasping woman, who crushed down every nice instinct of womanhood in order to become a King's mistress ; who knew no scruple, so that she kept the King's will ; who was without mercy, without pardon, without remorse, without forgetfulness ; who never passed by an enemy ; bitter and adamant in revenge — a revenge that waited with a cold smile until it could strike ; who turned a deaf ear to every cry from the Bastille, whose heart knew no friend but self, who made of statecraft a vulgar trade, — to her at least one great service must be allowed. She was no formal patron of Art. What heart she had was in it. And Art blossomed like a garden in France. She created the outer habit of France — the room, the Salon, the fashions, the furniture, the carriage, the chairs, the fans, china, tapestries ; the whole domain of the cultured man's habitation and its ornament were dictated by and were subject to her. She mothered it all. And mothering it upon France she mothered it upon the whole of Europe. Under her fostering care the arts and crafts flourished. We are wont to speak of it as the age of Louis Quinze — it was the age of Jeanne Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour. CHAPTER XXXVI WHEREIN WE SEE OLD AGE STEALING THE CUNNING FROM MEN'S HANDS Nor did the death of the Pompadour rob France of what was best in her. Her brother Marigny remained director of public taste ; and he seized every chance to prove his friendship to the artistic genius of his day. At the death of the First Painter to the King, Carle van Loo, he secured for the aging Boucher the high honour of this rank in his sixty-second year. And Boucher had need of honour now. The critics were assailing him with heavy attacks. He tried to catch the new thought ; but it was not in him. Serious illnesses sapped his strength. He saw that his skill belonged to a passing splendour ; and he went back to his old triumphs, sending to the Salon of 1765 the subjects that he had made his own. Diderot gave himself up to outrageous violence. Boucher continued to paint, as he had always painted — except that he painted not so well. He was growing old. To the Salon of 1767 he sent nothing. Diderot attacked him for his absence as rabidly as for his former contributions — sneered at him, as First Painter to the King, for not having the progress of Art more at heart ! Nothing that he can do is now well done ; whether he does or does not, at least he is wrong. Philosophy has conquered in Art. But Diderot has near spent his last spite upon a gentle spirit. Boucher is going to his grave. iS7 158 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. La Tour was absent from the Salon for five years, sending neither to the displays of 1765 nor 1767. Except for his visit to England in youth, La Tour never set foot outside France until the May of 1766, in his sixty-second year, when Holland drew him abroad. A letter of his from Amsterdam to Marigny refers to the death of La Tour's elder surviving brother Charles, with whom he had lived in Paris, and makes known that he cannot bring himself to return whither he will never again see " the brother whom he loved as much as he respected." The old artist was received with the kindliest hospitality into the family of Mademoiselle de Tuyll, afterwards Madame de Charriere, at Zuylen, near Utrecht. The letters of Mademoiselle de Tuyll remain to show how La Tour agonised over his work in order to achieve the uttermost of which his hand's skill was capable. She is not wearied, because he " knows how to talk — he has wit, he has seen many things, he has known curious people." Her portrait gives him incredible trouble, and he works himself into a fever of restlessness, for he wishes this portrait to be " absolutely the young woman herself." Some days later comes another letter from the pretty victim. The portrait has been admirable ; every day she has thought it would be the last sitting ; he had nothing to add to it but a touch to the eyes, but it will not come. He searches, retouches. The face changes without ceasing. The artist is desolate. He has failed to make the finest portrait in the world ; for it has no resemblance — nor has he hope of ever giving it any. However, he begins again every morning, and will not leave her all day any more than her shadow. Luckily he is very amiable, and tells her a thousand curious things. Her only chance of writing a letter is in her bedroom. He has made an excellent picture of her uncle, and touched with life one that she has made of her mother. He is charming, and gives her infinite pleasure. . . . He destroys the portrait. The second attempt of La Tour is splendid — it satisfies him xxxvi OLD AGE 159 more. She is becoming possessed of an insufferable pride, she vows, since La Tour often sees Madame d'Etioles (the Pompadour) in her face, and the beautiful Princesse de Rohan. . . . For two months he has been at work upon this second portrait, painting her all the morning and every morning, gossiping about the Court at Versailles and about the doings of Paris. " It is a man of wit and honesty." She hopes he will leave the second one ; for " it really lives. To destroy it would be murder." " His mania is to put into it all that I say, all that I think, and all that I feel. And he kills himself." " To reward him " she " entertains him all day," and " this morning it would have taken very little to let myself hug him." The pretty friendship between the old artist and this bright young Dutch lady lasted until the end, as shown by the long letters that passed between them. The death of La Tour's beloved brother Charles, the well-to-do contractor of supplies to the army, in 1766, was keenly felt by the painter, now in his sixty-second year. The two men had long lived together ; had largely shared each other's good fortune ; and had been close friends. La Tour's affection was henceforth poured out upon his sole surviving step-brother, Jean Francois de La Tour, the lieutenant of cavalry, who was to become his executor and heir. For five years La Tour had been absent from the Salons, when, to the display of 1769 he sent four pastel heads under the same number — four heads that sent Grimm into ecstasies, three of which were Gravelot, the Abbe Regley, and M. Patrot, Secretary to the Duke of Belle-Isle. It was to be the last time the artist heard the note of praise. La Tour was then in his sixty-fifth year, and ageing rapidly. CHAPTER XXXVII WHEREIN IS MUCH FUTILE BURNING OF THE NEW THOUGHT BY THE COMMON HANGMAN Frederick, in the deepest despondency after his defeat at Kolin, his lands overrun by the Allies, spoke and wrote of suicide. Voltaire wrote him a gracious letter of sympathy ; and the old friendly correspondence started again, not without moments of acrimony. The victory of Rossbach brought out the sun again over Prussia. Damiens' attempt on the French King's life had thrown Louis into his old terror of death ; and he had come near to putting the Pompadour from him ; but she had won, with Choiseul as her ally. Voltaire, with these friends of philosophy in power, bought the demesne of Ferney that will ever be linked with his name — three and a half miles from Geneva, but on French soil. So, if France were hostile he could skip to Delices in Switzerland ; if the Swiss were unpleasant he could get him tripping to France. He also bought the old chateau of Tournay, which gave him the right to the title of Comte de Tournay, about which Frederick was wont to chaff him. At Tournay he built a theatre. It was there that, hearing ofthe state of Corneille's family, he sent for the dead dramatist's grand-niece Marie, watched over her, and gave her a good religious education, and a dowry for her marriage with a French officer. There also he finished Candide and the History of Peter the Great. And it was now, whilst he was himself taking Corneille's grand-niece to Mass every day, that he flung aside all toying with the Church, and wrote his great article on " Superstitions " in his famous Ecrasez I' Inflame (Crush the Infamous One). He writes to D'Alembert on June 23, 1760, that this is now the great object — 160 XXX PORTRAIT OF A LADY BY PERRONNEAU {At Orleans Museum) ch. xxxvii BURNING OF NEW THOUGHT 161 to make France as free for the printed thought as England is, " it is the greatest service that can be rendered to the human race." His Law of Nature had lately been burnt by the public hangman by order of the Parliament, that work in which he asserted that God had given to human beings the knowledge of right and wrong. The bigot Jansenist, when in power, he found as bigoted as the Jesuit. The Jansenist Parliament ordered the seizing also of the Encyclopedia, and the minister Malesherbes had to warn Diderot, and get him to send the copies to his, the Minister's, house, until the storm was over ; in such strange moods was democracy. The Puritan in power would destroy the ladder by which it had mounted, and in its place turn persecutor. Voltaire burst into stinging satire of the Jesuits in L'Ecossaise, so that Le Franc de Pompignan had to flee Paris. But this was mere " sniping " at the outposts. He realised that there was as little real liberty under the Protestants of France as under the Romanists ; in England alone could he find such liberty under Protestantism. He saw, in the name of Christianity, at his very doors in Geneva, Rousseau's Emile ordered to be burnt, and Rousseau ordered to be arrested. Voltaire now opened the whole battery of his splendid gifts against the enemies of liberty ; to his undying honour, he fearlessly lead the defence of the Calas and their fellow-victims of a brutal and cruel superstition. Toulouse, ever noted for its black bigotry (the Massacre of St. Bartholomew being celebrated by the town as a yearly holiday amidst wild enthusiasm !), was the theatre of an appalling crime in 1761. A worthy Huguenot draper, one Calas, had, in a large family, a son Louis who turned Romanist ; but the father refused to interfere with his liberty of conscience. Another son, a gloomy, ambitious young fellow of twenty-five, Marc Antoine Calas, found his way barred to the law by the need to turn Catholic. He was found hanging in his father's drapery shop. The people of the town took up the affair hotly — they swore that the young man had been strangled by his Huguenot family because he had turned Catholic ; the magistracy, populace, and clergy took up the cry, and the worthy old father, the mother, and a son Pierre were arrested, were put through a show Y 1 62 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. of trial, and the father condemned to death. The old man was tortured to make him confess, then broken on the wheel — bearing his awful punishment without flinching on the ioth of March 1762, a month after a Huguenot pastor had been hanged in the town for preaching, baptizing, and marrying members of his flock. Voltaire leaped at the awful state-crime, harried those responsible for it, and employing his interest, first with Richelieu and the Pompa dour, then, at their failing, by means of flooding the country with pamphlets and satires, wore down the Government. In March 1765 a new trial was ordered and the Calas family exonerated. By this Voltaire won the favour of the whole of Protestant and freethinking Europe. His power at this time was stupendous. But he detested the bigotry of the Protestants as much as that of the more powerful Catholics. He published his theistic Dictionary of Philosophy in 1764, secretly, and vowing that he had not written it. He even signed the Arch bishop of Canterbury's name to a part of it ! Everywhere it was being burnt by public hangmen ; everywhere it was being pushed and thrust upon the people. Voltaire never showed such unscrupulous ingenuity as in these the years of his seventies. He seemed to take a devilish glee in spreading the book through Protestant, if equally bigoted, Geneva. It lay in every pew in the very churches, bound like a prayer-book ! He was now the most popular man in France. In 1764 he defended Sirven and his old wife, against whom the Church had struck, as in Calas's case, and had condemned them to death because their demented daughter, who had turned Catholic, committed suicide in a well. Then came the state-crime against the young Chevalier de la Barre, who, suspected of atheism, was officially murdered at Abbeville, being first tortured and then beheaded, on accusation of defiling cruci fixes at that town. His death caused profound horror throughout France. Though Voltaire had friends in Choiseul and Richelieu, he could not move the King, who refused to interfere. Voltaire had grown enormously rich by his thrift and his busi ness capacity ; he now formed his famous industrial colony at Ferney to give work and means of livelihood to the persecuted natives in xxxvii BURNING OF NEW THOUGHT 163 the civil parts of Geneva. It was skilled labour ; and soon Ferney in France blossomed. The city of Calvin had burnt Rousseau's Contrat Social, which had created a small revolution in the Swiss republic. Ferney became at once a thriving colony of watchmakers, silk-weavers, and lace-makers. Voltaire flung himself into the busi ness of advertising-tout with all his great eager energy, and soon the Ferney watches were seen everywhere — in Russia, in Turkey, in the Far East. At the same time, during these the years of his seventies, he poured out literary work — the Essai sur les Moeurs, in which he displayed his vast culture, and attacked the crimes of the Christian peoples. He wrote more than a dozen dramas. But Voltaire was now becoming alarmed at the results that were being produced by free thought. The philosophers, rejecting first Catholicism, then Protestantism, were now rejecting Theism — denying a God altogether. Diderot was proclaiming atheism far and wide. A lady was heard to say of Voltaire : " He is a bigot — he is a deist." In 1770 D'Holbach's System of Nature startled the thinking world. Voltaire and Frederick of Prussia both took up the pen to attack D'Holbach. Under " Dieu " in the Philosophic Dictionary, Voltaire sets down the necessity of a God from the evidences of design throughout Nature. He combated atheism with all his old skill. His theism was of the heart as well as of the head. He uttered the famous saying, " If there had been no God, it would have been necessary to in vent one." During his latter years he worked much lying in bed, living simply on coffee and eggs. The amount he wrote was prodigious. He was now seventy-eight. He fought like a youth in all his power for the brave Lally, who had fallen into disgrace through defeat in India. Lally, taken prisoner by the English, was admitted to parole ; but, owing to the bitter clamour of the French East India share holders, he was seized and arrested in Paris, condemned to death by Parliament, and, drawn on a hurdle to the Place de Greve, there beheaded. Voltaire also fought the farmers-general tooth and nail — jjj^aignSlmif ^fW*r*'>v«*,*ir«»«li»X»^,vl«.^ -* •""iV-'ftpHfaci 164 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xxxvii and the monks, who continued to carry on serfdom amongst their people. He was carrying on vast business enterprises, writing a heavy correspondence with Catherine of Russia, Frederick of Prussia, with D'Alembert and the philosophers. Nothing published in Paris missed his eagle eye. xxxi MADAME VALADE BY PERRONNEAU {At Orleans Museum) CHAPTER XXXVIII IN WHICH A TOAST IS DRUNK TO A NEW BEAUTY Four years after the Pompadour lay down and died, the patient neglected Queen, amiable dull Marie Leczinska, followed her sup- planter to the grave. The King's grief and contrition, and his solemn vows to amend his ways, came somewhat late ; and lasted little longer than the drying of the floods of his tears over the body of his dead consort. On the Eve of Candlemas, the first day of the February of 1769, at a convivial party that was held in a great house in Paris, not wholly devoid of political intrigue, there stood up a Jesuit priest who raised his glass " To the Presentation ! " and, he added, with the subtlety of a conspirator, " to that which has taken place to-day, or will take place to-morrow, the presentation of the new Esther, who is to replace Haman and release the Jewish nation from oppression ! " He spoke figuratively. It was safer so. But 'twas understood. Indeed, the pretty sentiment, so prettily delivered, was well received by the old aristocrats and the young bloods who sat about the table ; they raised their glasses and drank a bumper to the pretty Madame du Barry. Truth to tell, the Jesuits had no love for the Due de Choiseul ; and the madcap girl was but a lure whereby it was planned to draw the King from his great Minister. Therefore it came about that religion rallied about the frail beauty, and the Church hid behind her extravagant skirts — one of which alone 165 1 66 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. was to cost close upon £2000 — and thus with the old nobility of France drank damnation to the King, his Minister, and to the devil with Parliaments and the new philosophy and the rights or the people ! Long live the King, and the Divine Right of Kings, and the King's mistress — so that she but served the Church well ! The worthy priest seems to have had the ear of destiny, though he dated his certainty near upon a couple of months too soon — or, that which had been ordained met with a hitch and was put off some seven or eight weeks or so. Be that as it may, before the year was out the old King was become the doting creature of a light - o' - love of Paris, the transfigured milliner and street-pedlar Jeanne, natural child of one Anne Bequs, a low woman of Vaucouleurs. This Jeanne, of no surname and unknown father, a pretty, kindly, vulgar child of the gutters, with fair hair and of madcap habits, was some twenty- six years of age — though a forged certificate sets her down as younger — when, being reborn under a forged birth -certificate at the King's ordering as Anne de Vaubernier, and being married by the same orders of his Majesty to the Comte du Barry, an obliging nobleman of the Court, she appeared at Versailles as the immortally frail Comtesse du Barry. The remonstrances of Choiseul with the King against this new and deeper degradation of the throne of France, and his unconcealed scorn and disgust of the upstart countess, made a dangerous enemy for France's great Minister, ringed about though he was with some of the mightiest names. She was to cost him and his France very dear. The King's infatuation brought royalty into utter contempt amongst the people. The Du Barry brought to the King's house a gentler kindlier atmosphere ; she had no will for power or care for politics ; her genial nature shrank from the lettre de cachet, and she had but eyes of horror for the Bastille. But she was of the gutter. She had the mere love of fineries of the girl promoted from the milliner's shop. She loved display. She brought the xxxviii A TOAST TO A NEW BEAUTY 167 vulgar singers of the lowest theatres into the King's palace, where the Pompadour had brought the wits and leading artists of her time. The old culture was gone. Louis laughed now at ribald songs, and was entertained by clowns. But the scandals of the Court, the coming of the Du Barry, the Jesuit intrigues against France's great Minister, mattered little now to the First Painter to the King. To the Salon of 1769 Boucher sent his last canvas. Diderot dipped his pen in vulgar ink with huge glee. But praise had long been a scarce commodity to the " Glory of Paris." The old painter had for some time gone about the courtyards of the Louvre like a mere shadow of himself — afflicted with all the infirmities that come to a life that has been consumed in hard work and the pursuit of pleasure. When the clocks of Paris struck five on the morning of the 30th of May in 1770, some one went to his studio door and knocked ; but there was no answer. They found him seated at his easel before a picture of Venus, where he had been waiting for the early day to bring him light, the brush fallen from his dead fingers, his bright kindly spirit gone from him. Boucher died a few months before the Christmas Eve that saw Choiseul driven from power by the Du Barry, or rather by the trio of knaves who used the vulgar but kindly woman as their tool — indeed, she refused to help to pull the great Minister down until she had made handsome terms of surrender on his behalf. They would have sent him to disgrace, insulted and plucked of all his honours, but for her. Choiseul was too astute a man not to see what lay beyond the shadows of her pretty skirts — nay, when the King, with " quivering of the chin," had faltered out his dismissal, does Choiseul not turn in the courtyard, his lettre de cachet (ordering him to his estates) in his pocket, and, seeing a woman looking out from a window at the end of the alley, bow and kiss his hand towards where, half-hiding, gazes out of tear- filled eyes this strange doomed beauty who has won to the sceptre of France ! CHAPTER XXXIX WHICH DISCOVERS A HURRIED FUNERAL AND MADAME DU BARRY A-WEEPING From the Christmas Eve that saw Louis' only capable Minister leave the courtyards of Versailles, driven from power, 'twas four years before the small-pox took the King — four years during which the Du Barry's precious trio, D'Aiguillon, Maupeou, and Terray, sent the Members of Parliament into banishment : four years that sent royal France rushing with giant strides, midst laughter and riot, towards its doom, whilst the apathetic Louis shrugged his now gross royal shoulders at all warnings of catastrophe — warnings which, to give him credit, he was scarce witless enough or blind enough not to foresee. Nay, did he not openly admit it in his constantly affirmed, if careless creed, that " things, as they were, would last as long as he ; and he that came after him must shift for himself" ? He came even nearer to the full significance of the madness and the riot when, shrugging his no longer well-beloved shoulders, he repeated the Pompadour's cynical saying of " apres nous le diluge ! " Indeed, the neatly turned phrase was not lacking to Louis the Well-Beloved's age ; wit and ruthless fatuity were the order of the day — these folk were wondrous full of the polished epigram, and not without vision. Most fatuous of them all, and ruthless as the worst, was the Abbe Terray — he who tinkered with finance, as the weak Minister ever does, with, as crowning crime to his many infamies, the scandalous Pacte de Famille ; that mercantile company that schemed to produce an artificial rise in the price of corn by 168 ch.xxxix MADAME DU BARRY A- WEEPING 169 buying up the grain of France, exporting it, and bringing it back for sale at vast profit — with Louis of France as considerable shareholder in the ugly business. Indeed, asked the old noblesse, had not the owners of the land the right to do what they would with their own ? 'Twas small wonder that the Well- Beloved became the highly-detested of the groaning people. Nevertheless, Louis of France spake prophecy. The guillotine was not for him. In the May of 1774 he was stricken down with the small-pox ; and the sickroom in the palace saw the Du Barry and her party fight a duel with the party of the banished Choiseul for possession of the King — as the Chateauroux had fought Maurepas aforetime, when death and the small-pox had threatened Louis at Metz. Never, surely, was a more grim or more fantastic warfare than that bitter and keen intrigue on the one side to get the confessor to the King's bedside by the party of the freethinkers, and the intrigue on the other to prevent the priest's getting there by the aged Richelieu and the Court party — in which the strange blasphemy was enacted of the Eucharist being hustled about the passages, whilst the bigots strove against its administration and the making of his confession by the King, and the freethinkers demanded the last consolation of the Church and the granting of the Absolution to the Monarch. At last the delirious man called for the priest, and he, spite of the foul threats of old Richelieu and his son Fronsac, entered and confessed his King. The inevitable refusal to absolve him from his sins unless he put the Du Barry from him followed ; and the weeping woman left the royal apartments for ever, being driven away in D'Aiguillon's carriage, his Duchess comforting her with hopes of the King's recovery. On the 10th of May the small-pox took his distempered body, " already a mass of corruption," that was hastily flung into a coffin and, without pomp or circumstance or pretence of honours, hurried to Saint Denis — being rattled thereto at the trot, the crowds that lined the way showering epigrams not wholly friendly upon its 170 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch.xxxix ignoble passing — and was buried amongst the bones of the ancient kings of his race, unattended by the Court, and amidst the contempt and loud curses of his people. And the Court, turning its back upon the pestilential room where the dead King lay, rushed to hail the new King and his Queen — the ill-fated Louis the Sixteenth and tactless Marie Antoinette. XXXII LAURENT CARS BY PERRONNEAU {Louvre) CHAPTER XL WHEREIN WE CATCH GLIMPSES OF THE CULMINATION OF A RESTLESS INTRANQUIL SPIRIT, NOT UNACQUAINTED WITH SADNESS The gossip pen of the poet Robbe de Beauveset which discovered to us the martyrdom of the lesser poetry when sitting to Perronneau, bears witness to the artist's making portraits of Cochin and Joseph Vernet. in the year 1759 ; though all trace of both is lost — as also is that of the Four heads under the same number of the Salon of this same year. But one of Perronneau's masterpieces, the Laurent Cars, was painted about this time to prove his gifts. Perronneau was now leading a wandering life, of which little trace can be found. He was at Lyons in 1759 ; in Italy between the January and September of the same year ; then he is found working on portraits for some two or three years in Holland, where he clearly won a large number of sitters to his studio. He does not appear again at the Salons until 1763, to which he sends the portraits of M. Asselaer, of M. Hauguer, of M. Guelwin, and M. Tolling ; also portraits of M. et Madame Durdaine de Montigny (oval), of Madame de Tourolle, of Madame Perronneau making bows of ribbon, and of an infant. On the 29th of December in 1765, he bought for 16,000 livres a house by the Barriere de Montreuil. A son was born to him on the 10th of November 1766 — Alexandre Joseph Urbain Perronneau, who was afterwards to be known as Urbain Perronneau. However, in this year of 1765, in which he bought his house outside Paris, he sent to the Salon four nortraits in oils and the three pastels of Mademoiselle de Bossy ; of Mademoiselle Penchinat as Diana (an oval) ; 171 172 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. and of Madame Miron. At Orleans he painted in the same year the portraits of Robert Soyer, of Mademoiselle Desfriches ; and in 1766 those of Madame Fuet, and of Lenormant de Coudry, shown at the Salon of 1769 with the Mademoiselle Desfriches. The Salon of 1767 baffles us with its Several heads in pastel under the same number, except that one of them was the Aurora, now at the Orleans Museum. About this time he painted the portrait of the Marchioness of Marigny, and one of Marmontel. In this year he was at Bordeaux, where he painted his great portrait of Madame Journu. The Madame Rateau is dated 1769 ; also a Girl and a Little Girl, as well as the Marquis de Pelleport-Burete's " Jeune Femme" and Boy dressed as a Hussar. At the Salon of 1769 were seen the Madame Journu, the M. Darcy, the Mademoiselle Gaugy, the Lenormant de Coudry, and the Mademoiselle Desfriches. They were loudly praised by the critics, though one scribbler irritably wants to know who on earth these nobodies are, and why they are painted ! The same pen compares La Tour with Perronneau and Duplessis and Roslin, to their grievous disadvantage. Diderot, as usual, attacks Perronneau bitterly, ranking him " amongst the poor devils who do not deserve all together a line of writing " ! Poor Perronneau wrote to his friend Desfriches in the January of 1770 of his worries : he finds wandering about to be cheaper than rooms in Paris, where he must be alone, since the racket of the children distracts him to madness — evidently a nerve -inflicted man of genius this Perronneau ; and the stabs of the critics do not help to soothe the nerves. Two years and a half afterwards he was in Holland again. His wife is evidently at Petit-Charonne, their home just outside Paris, ailing and sad, and threatened with lung trouble. It is clear that the Du Barry's reign brings no sunlight into the Perronneau household. Perronneau's journey into Holland was this time not a very fruitful one, and but adds to the family gloom — not from lack of payment by his sitters, but from lack of very sitters. His health also begins to break down. xl A RESTLESS INTRANQUIL SPIRIT 173 On the May- Day of 1772 Perronneau has arrived in Paris again, but does not remain long therein. Michel Bouvart de Fourqueux — he who was afterwards to succeed Louis the Sixteenth's Calonne as Controller-General of Finance — was Perronneau's chief ally and friend. But in Paris Perronneau seems to gather about him no greater crowd of sitters than in Holland, for all Fourqueux's efforts to befriend him. Ill-luck has fallen upon the man, and losses which, as he manfully vows, he must use all his strength to repair. In the April of 1773 a second son was born to him. He has gone southwards to Lyons to gather what harvest he can from the field that was once so rich for his sowing ; but even amongst his old Lyons clients there is now aloofness — success begins to flee the artist at every hand. His wife, too, had fallen into a deep melancholy. With scant harvest from his Lyons journey, Perronneau came back to Paris in the summer, and sent to the Salon of 1773 the portraits of M. V. R. (Van Robais), of M. Duperel (oils), of An Old Man of eighty-three, and Several other portraits under the same number. Perronneau is discouraged and ageing rapidly — that sad fact at least peeps out from the few glimpses we have of him in his letters. The splendour of the Du Barry had brought no splendour to him. As little does the death of Louis the Well -Beloved or the flight of the weeping Du Barry benefit him. CHAPTER XLI WHICH DISCOVERS A WORTHY BANKER BEHIND THE THRONE OF FRANCE The young King Louis the Sixteenth and his consort came to rule over a dangerous France. The ancient splendour of a great, if not the greatest, inheritance of their day was theirs ; but the inheritance of a terrible hate went with it. The scandalous levity of the privileged class, and its ruthless vindictiveness when thwarted, had near done their work ; and had done it most thorough well. A proud and gallant people had touched bottom in humiliation. The pens of the wits and thinkers had sent the new opinions broadcast amongst a people wholly scandalised and heavily punished by the corruption of their governors. These writings had made astounding and alarming way. The " intellectuals " had all been on the side of the people — Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, D'Alembert, Helvetius, Condillac, the Abbe Raynal. With wit and sarcasm and invective and argument, they stirred deep passions — appealing to self-respect, to the dignity of manhood, to honour, to the innate love of freedom in the strong ; they founded their appeal on common sense, on the craving for liberty in man's being, on the rights of the individual. And the printing-press spread their wit and their wisdom throughout the breadth of the land to the uttermost corners of France. They sneered away false aristocracy, false religion. They wrought to overthrow the old order, and brought it into utter contempt. And they needed to manufacture no false witness. France had lain supine, a mighty people, as they 174 LE MARQUIS D'ARGENSON By De La Tour at St. Quentin ch.xli A WORTHY BANKER 175 proved themselves when their right arms were freed — lain in chains under the heel of a King who had ended by setting their necks under the feet of a trivial and foolish woman whose nursery had been the gutter. Yet the Du Barry, when all her faults are set down and weighed against her pretty being, suffered undue execration. She had no smallest grain of ill-will in her nature. The wrongs that the King's Ministers made her do to their enemies she mitigated by her generosities. During her sway the Bastille received no prisoner at her ordering — vengeance was not in her. She was the tool of unscrupulous men ; but she came between them and their base spites, and kept the Court free from the brutalities that the Pompadour had meted out to her enemies without a pang of remorse. During the whole of her reign she visited her old mother every fortnight, and lavished benefits on her lowly kin — whom most women, thus suddenly raised to the noblesse, would have avoided like a plague. The scoundrels who made her their tool were responsible for every evil deed that she was accused of committing. And even the new King, Louis the Sixteenth — whose sharp lettre de cachet, written two days after he came to the throne, banished her to a convent — soon relented, and allowed her to go back to her home of Luciennes that her royal lover had given her. But what a significance was in that lettre de cachet ! The Du Barry had striven to abolish the lettre de cachet ; the virtuous young King brought it back — in two days — inaugurating his reign by having one sent to the woman whose gentleness and kindliness had shrunk from the accursed thing ! It was a fit omen of the well-meaning but incompetent King's tragic destiny. However, the sun shone upon the coming of the new King and his consort. Louis the Sixteenth, third son of the Dauphin who had been Louis the Fifteenth's only lawful son, ascended the throne in his twentieth year, a pure-minded young fellow, full of the best intentions, and sincerely anxious for the well-being of 176 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch.xli his people ; but of a diffident and timid judgment, and under the influence of a young Queen, the beautiful Marie Antoinette, of imperious temper and of light and frivolous manners, who brought to her counsels a deplorable lack of judgment and a narrow view of men. The Du Barry sent a -packing, and D'Aiguillon and the rest of their crew with them, the young King recalled the crafty old Maurepas, who had been banished by the Pompadour, an ill move — though the setting of the great Turgot over the finances augured well. And when that great Minister fell, he gave way to near as good a man, the worthy and honest banker Neckar. CHAPTER XLII WHICH IS HAUNTED BY THE CHILL SNEER OF SILENCE To the Salon of 1771 La Tour sent three portraits of men ; but the dry description of the catalogue gives us no hint of their personalities ; and the gossip of the critics is now silent concerning them. Two years afterwards (1773) he sends several heads again ; and again the critics are silent ; and the tattle of the newspapers ceases to break through the secret. La Tour has suddenly become an old man on the eve of seventy ; and the cunning of his hand is departing from him. His work is now treated with kindly pity — he has become the Man that Was. The fire has gone out of his art, the labour alone remains and proclaims itself. That splendid discontent with the achievement as compared with the vision, and that labour to accomplish what his will desired, which caused him only too often to put work upon a picture that added nothing to its artistic value, grew upon him, so that he got into the habit of tormenting and teasing a fine thing until he spoiled it, and, disgusted, blotted it out, to find that the new thing he created instead of it did not reach to the perfection of the thing he had destroyed, had he but left it when his hand's skill had made it perfect. Pastel is a medium which, from its very nature, cannot be loaded and fretted and overwrought. He was, besides, tormented by the desire to find a means of making the pastel permanent — of ridding it of its only serious flaw, that fragile blemish of being easily rubbed that makes it a ready victim to anything but the most careful handling, its beauty 177 2 A 178 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. destroyed by any rough touch. Pastel, the most permanent colour in all the realm of the painter's art, if it could only be set so as to resist exposure or the ordinary buffets to which oil-paintings, and to a far lesser degree water-colours, are exposed, would be an ideal means whereby the original colour that the artist employs upon his craftsmanship should endure as he sets it down, tone for tone, and pigment for pigment — for it does not change, as the ageing of the oils darken oil-paint, nor does it fade as water- colours fade. To the achieving of this desire La Tour bent all his vigorous will, dreamed of it, experimented, schemed and laboured — only to destroy, or to damage, some of the most exquisite work of his life. This search for a means to " fix " pastels, and thereby render the stroke of _ the coloured chalk permanent, became not only a keen pursuit of many artists, but a hobby of the day, in which priest and soldier, lawyers and men of affairs took part, as, of old, men had sought for the philosopher's stone. The claim to have discovered the secret, early made by Loriot, a secret which he refused to communicate, only fired others to further experiments, and La Tour not least of all. This secret was at last bought by Louis the Sixteenth in 1780, La Tour's seventy-sixth year, and given forth. In the September of 1778 La Tour made a third change in his lodgings at the Louvre, whereby he took possession, by agreement, of the apartments that belonged to Greuze and his wife. This changing of apartments became a subject of jest amongst the artists ; it led to Tocque's waggery that La Tour wanted to find a good light to repaint his portrait of Restout — that unfortunate portrait which the restless hand of the artist seemed unable to leave alone, touching it and retouching it, and "fixing" it, until his itch for altering it became a thing to titter at. This portrait, and that of Dumont le Romain, as we know from Diderot's later letters on art written about this time, were un fortunately within his reach and suffered from his plague of discontent thereby. " A celebrated painter of our days," writes Diderot, " employs the last years of his life to spoil the masterpieces that he JEAN RESTOUT By De La Tour at St. Quentin xlii THE CHILL SNEER OF SILENCE 179 created in the vigour of his days. I know not whether the blemishes he sees upon them are real ; but the skill which would correct them has gone from him, for all that which is of man perishes with man — there comes a time when taste gives counsel of which one recognises the justice, but which one has no longer the strength to follow." In this year La Tour's step-brother, Jean Francois de La Tour, retired from his brilliant career in the army, decorated with the Cross of Saint Louis ; and settled in his native town of Saint Quentin. The act drew the ageing painter's eyes towards the place that had bred him. La Tour seems to have realised in 1768, his sixty-fourth year, that his life's work was near done. The silence of the critics was not lost upon him. He had begun to put his house in order. His brain fretted over the fixing of pastels ; it fretted over the disposal of his possessions after his passing. He plotted and planned schemes for prizes to enable young artists to get an artistic education. He drafted deeds ; held discussions with the mayors and aldermen of Saint Quentin, disputes with his colleagues of the Academy. He had ever affirmed that " the rich ought to pay for the poor." He wrote long " philosophical " dissertations in his correspondence about these things — confused ideas on the future life, apostrophes to humanity and justice and remorse, and the like, ending with a hymn of praise in honour of Voltaire. It was said of La Tour that " he bit off a larger piece of the philosophy of his age than he could digest." But it cannot be denied that the philosophic aims towards a bettering of the condition of the people and a nobler ideal of life loomed large in his eyes. He chose his closest friends from amongst the thinkers of his day ; and neither he nor they seem to have suffered indigestion thereby, for they took pride in his friendship and pleasure in his company. He moved, a shining light and a caustic wit, in the high world of art and letters. He had the gift of the pen, as his letters show. He had the passion of the intellectuals for humanity and liberty ; a contempt, which he took no pains to conceal, for the mediocre, the merely rich and the 180 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. merely great ones. He writes as an artist writes, seeing life pictorially, ideas as images, which he raises before us with no blundering pen. He had been racked his life long by eager and hot passions, by fierce and keen moods ; and his restless spirit and morbid will had fought his weaknesses and his passions with victories and defeats ; his soul was scarred with his losses. In his sixty-sixth year he writes : " Thine and Mine — which have so much sullied the purity of the moral aim, have no empire over my soul ; this cupidity, this thirst for riches, has not entered into my heart. What ! shall I deliver up my being to unreal passions so opposed to the design of the Author of Nature and to the welfare of the human race, when at a moment I may find myself at that edge of an eternity where our treasures and all the passions are stripped from us ! " When he asks for the State's recognition of his genius, he goes a-suing in no humble or courtier fashion, with bowed back and servile apostrophes. He walks upright, proud of his art's status and of his achievement in that art, to the very steps of the throne, and demands recognition as a man and as an artist : "You may be justified in the eyes of the law, but you are not justified in the eyes of the Supreme Being, who demands that we shall love the truth." Yet he knows his weaknesses, his faults, his manifold blunderings : " Place yourself before the moments at which all the illusions of passion cease, and where gold is but vile dust that no longer blinds us, but which has fallen from us " — so he would fight the intoxication of his senses and calm his eager inclinations. Of his artistic achievement he could say, towards the end of its splendid fulfilment : " I have followed my career with constancy — my very great sensitiveness has been partaker of cares and fatigues to do my utmost with my gifts, and has racked me with anguish to be virtuous." Indeed, he came into his kingdom with no easy stride and mere facility. His art tore him. He writes to Marigny on the edge of his sixtieth year : " I have not enough of philosophy to set me above a sense of injustice. ... I have never been able to understand M. Coypel's ruling that the price of a state-portrait should be 1500 xlii THE CHILL SNEER OF SILENCE 181 livres ; he should have known the difference between those who, working by routine, can produce ten pictures instead of one, and those who strive seriously to reproduce nature by selection — painting is a pastime to the one, but for the other the sea to drink. What care, what combinations, what painful searchings are needed to keep the unity of the movements in spite of the changes which the succession of thoughts and the play of the soul produce over the face and on the forms ! A new portrait is born at each change. And the shift ing light, which varies and makes to vary the subtleties of colour, follows the course of the sun and the moods of the hour which produces it. These alterations are as bewildering as the subtlety with which they come. A man devoured by ambition for his art is justified in complaining of having to struggle with so many obstacles." Sharing the contempt of the intellectuals for the sham governance and sham religiosity of his age, La Tour never lost his sense of a divinity — a Supreme Being that was no empty phrase in his mouth, but the fountain of justice and of humanity and well-doing, and the guide ofthe universe. "The passionate ardour of my youth thrust me only too often into transgressions of which I cannot enough repent ; but it never inspired in me that blasphemous impiety which under takes to pull down the lord of all being from his throne. ... I believe, with Pascal, that the desire for immortality is of our very essence, a part of the love of truth, of justice, and of well-doing ; and that they who carefully examine their impressions will be rewarded by the joy, always new, of the contemplation of the supreme wisdom in the ordering of so many millions of worlds, and the delicious happiness of being able to reflect on the admirable and the most secret resources of divine providence. What a multitude of objects to watch over in scenes so vast and so various ! " I sigh with impatience, before taking part in a spectacle so wonderful, to be able to embrace M. de Voltaire, and to thank him for all the services he has rendered, more than all the philosophers together have done, to justice and to humanity, and in becoming the efficacious protector of the unfortunate, such as the Calas, the Sirven, 1 82 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xlii and all the others who have had need of his aid against injustices that others have done to them, or have desired to do." That Voltaire thought not lightly of his friend, and rated La Tour's gifts high, are proved by the pleasure and the pride that La Tour's words brought him when they were repeated to him. Voltaire's neat phrasing and apt turn of thought are. in the letter ofhis reply : " I am enchanted that you have some love for philosophy. You are right ; whoso adorns nature ought to understand it. I embrace you, my dear La Tour, without ceremonies — such are not made for those who cultivate the arts. V." In his intercourse with the great philosophic spirits of his day, La Tour had become possessed of the idea that a citizen lives in the future by his generous acts to his fellows. Thus he busied himself with plans, drafting, correcting, can celling, of which schemes there exist to-day the three prizes for students with which he endowed the Royal Academy — in Perspective, Anatomy, and Painting a Head or Torso from Nature, giving the different effects of light and shadow ; and on the ist of February 1776 the Academy accepted them. It is interesting to note that Ingres in 1 80 1 and 1802 was a sharer in this prize. In the same year of 1776 that he endowed the Academy, he endowed in his native town of Saint Quentin, his " patrie," as he loved to call it, a fund for old and infirm artisans ; another for a free school for teaching drawing, the knowledge of which had been a means of livelihood to him ; and a fund for " poor women in childbed," whereby he blotted out, in such fashion as he best could, the remorse for the act of his youth that had brought grave consequences upon his young cousin, the girl Anne Bougier — that girl-mother who stood in the dock before her judges, dishonoured for life, her lover fled. XXXIII LA DAME EN ROSE BY DROUAIS {Collection of the Marquise de Ganay) CHAPTER XLIII WHEREIN WE SEE THE NEW THOUGHT CROWNED WITH THE BAYS AMIDST WILD ENTHUSIASM, AND DEATH REAPING THEREAFTER The death of Louis the Fifteenth brought no sorrow to France. Voltaire, like all France, welcomed the new King ; and great was his joy on the calling of Turgot to power. Turgot was an ardent admirer of Voltaire's. His fall from power, after two years of office, was mitigated by the rise of Neckar. However, there was a mighty triumph awaiting Voltaire, sullenly looked upon by the young King, and independent of State or party. There came to Ferney a beautiful young woman, amiable, intelligent, charming, Mademoiselle de Varicourt, about to become a nun — too poor she was to be much else ; and her brothers came with her on the visit. Voltaire, weary of his scolding, flirting, ill-tempered niece, Madame Denis, turned eagerly to the companionship of the bright girl, and adopted her, calling her " Belle et Bonne." Another visitor to Ferney, the wealthy young roue, the Marquis of Villette, fell in love with the girl and married her in the autumn of 1777. Then there was nothing for it but that Voltaire must go to them in Paris. Voltaire needed no great coaxing to it. His drama of Irene was about to be played at the Comedie Francaise. He promised his disconsolate colony that he would soon be back, and started on a journey to Paris, received along the road with an enthusiasm that the King had never known. At an inn, where he stayed the night, the young bloods dressed as waiters so as to gaze upon him and serve him. He reached Paris on the fifth day, the 10th of February 1778 ; the news flew across the city and reached Versailles. All Paris flocked to the 183 1 84 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. Villettes to do him honour ; and the old man, in night-cap and dressing-gown, was welcomed by Richelieu, D'Alembert, Diderot, Turgot, and Franklin. To Franklin's grandson, on being asked to give the lad his blessing, he said, with hands raised over his head, " Remember God and Liberty." All Paris and most of the Court, with Marie Antoinette and the Comte d'Artois, were at the first night of Irene. The King alone sullenly refused to go. As the success increased act by act, messengers came to report to the old man on his bed of sickness. It gave him back youth. A fortnight afterwards he rose from his bed, put off his dressing-gown, put on an elaborate costume, and with his great peruke on his head, drove to a meeting of the Academy, where he had an exultant reception ; thence to the theatre, the crowd surging about his carriage and hailing him. In the theatre he tried to take a back-seat in the box, but the audience would not have it ; the drama was played to one long uproar of applause, and at the curtain's fall the players brought his bust on to the stage, and standing about it, crowned it with a wreath of laurel, amidst frantic rejoicings. Voltaire, with tears running down his old face, overcome with emotion, bowed low to their greetings. The excitement told on Voltaire's eighty-four years. He knew he ought to get back to Ferney. Paris held him. He went from one triumph to another. At the Academy of Science, Voltaire and Franklin shook hands and embraced. In April he attended a sitting of the Academy, and with the vigour of youth urged the making of a great Dictionary, undertaking himself to write the volume on A. Thenceforth the old lion was rapidly failing. He feared to die in Paris, lest his body should be refused burial and be flung into a kennel. At D'Alembert's advice he made a truce with the Church. Immediately afterwards he wrote, to cancel it, his " profession of faith " in his own handwriting : " I die, adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition." In writing his address to the Academy on the new French Dictionary, Voltaire drank many cups of coffee to keep himself awake. xliii NEW THOUGHT CROWNED WITH BAYS 185 He was attacked with sleeplessness, and on the 12th of May began to sink. He feared to send for his Geneva doctor Tronchin, a hard and unsympathetic man, for fear of a scolding. Richelieu coming to visit him, recommended opium. Voltaire took it in large doses. He grew delirious. He was roused from his dying lethargy by the news that the State had reversed the sentence on the dead Lally. Death came silently into the old man's room on the 30th of May 1778. An Abbe and a Cure tried to get a confession of faith from him ; but the dying man made as though to push them away, saying, " Let me die in peace ! " And his life peacefully left him. The King and the Church refused his body burial. Voltaire's nephew, by his beloved sister, the Abbe Mignot, hurried his body off to his ruined abbey of Scellieres in Champagne, near Romilli ; and got leave from the Prior to make the abbey its resting-place for a while on its way to Ferney. Orders, meanwhile, had been sent to Ferney by the Church not to allow burial there. This petty act was to cost King and Church an awful price — and that before thirteen years were run out. . . . The old age of Chardin had its sadness. The blow struck him by the death of his son was a terrible one to him. His health departed thereafter. In 1772, in his seventy-third year, he was reduced in flesh, and beginning to fail. He was heavily embarrassed for lack of money. The King's pensions were unpaid for several years, and he was obliged to sell, in the October of 1774, his house in the Rue Princesse. Marigny wrote a serious and dignified appeal to the Abbe Terray to support the Academy. His appeal succeeded, and the Academy was saved. On Christmas Day of 1774 Chardin resigned the office of treasurer, which had been a laborious one to him, amidst a generous outburst of thanks from the Academicians, followed by a great banquet in his honour. He also loyally stood by his friend Cochin, a rare friend to the art of France, in his internecine warfare with the jealous and egregious Academician, J. B. M. Pierre — and warfare distressed him. Cochin headed the Marigny faction against 2 B 1 86 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. D'Angiviller's faction, of which Pierre was the creature, but which was supported by Louis XVI., in his hatred of all the traditions of the years of Louis Quinze. The last years of Chardin were glorified by a splendid achieve ment, and not the least, perhaps even the greatest, part of his career. He had almost given up painting, his eyes and hand were weakening. He found in pastels a new artistic life. The Head of an old man ; a Head of a jockey (which he gave to Madame Victoire) ; above all, his two immortal portraits of himself — Chardin a I'abat-jour and Chardin aux besides — together with the portrait of Madame Chardin in old age, place him at the topmost rank of the great masters of that medium. Here we find him as ever the supreme technician, the pastel being used with consummate skill within the true limits of its handling — an example to all time. He employs the coloured chalk with the vigour of youth, with the vision and skill of his middle life. It is almost incredible that a man should be granted such powers at seventy. Here we see then the very equal of La Tour. The critics alone did not realise the masterpieces that he was giving them. But time has brought Chardin into his kingdom. His last act as an Academician was to add his signature to the high praise written on the picture sent from Rome by the brilliant student of the Academy, Louis David. It was characteristic of the man's whole honourable and just life, of his large-hearted interest in others. He sent in this, the last and eightieth year of his life, several pastel heads to the Salon (1779). He died on the 6th of December 1779, serene and courageously calm during his illness, sane, and clear-eyed, and strong-willed, with the philosophic simplicity of a Christian, with the decency and propriety in which he had lived. Insisting on shaving himself on the day of his death, he looked like his own last portrait of himself in pastels as he lay back and died. They buried him at Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, where Boucher also sleeps. XXXIV CHARDIN BY CHARDIN {Louvre) ¦ xliii NEW THOUGHT CROWNED WITH BAYS 187 To D'Angiviller, who was now in possession of Marigny's place, Chardin's widow addressed a pathetic plea for a part of the dead man's pension ; but D'Angiviller was not Marigny — the appeal was refused. She left the Louvre and went to live with her nephew, M. Atger, dying in 1791, in her eighty-fourth year. CHAPTER XLIV WHEREIN A GENIUS IS DISCOVERED DEAD IN AN INN, AND IS BURIED IN A PAUPER'S GRAVE The last ten years of Perronneau's life are befogged in a thick obscurity, now more than ever difficult to penetrate. Louis the Well-Beloved dead, and his Majesty forgotten ; the Du Barry flown — all matters little to Perronneau. Still less matters a new King, or whether he be as upright of life as the other lacked uprightness. Kings may come and kings may go. To Perronneau 'tis much the same. The Court ever meant little to him. He did not send any works to the Salon of 1775, the first of the new King's reign ; and in that of 1777 but one portrait is seen against his name, and that an oval in oils, M. Coquebert de Montbret, which calls forth harsh criticism of its hardness and of the " bilious " yellow vice of colouring that was rapidly growing upon the artist. His hand becomes heavy, and his eyes lose their clear vision. Rough criticism is his lot, except when he is wholly ignored — the most deadly form of criticism. At the Salon of 1 779 he displayed Several heads of women under the same number, concerning which the critics with one consent seemed to think that the less said the better. The old favourite has lost his court. Yet the Comte Goyon de Vaudurant, wearing the red ribbon of the Order of Saint Luke, is of this period, remarkable for its vitality and its strength — indeed it was long attributed to La Tour. But the Count did not receive the order until 1781, when La Tour was hopelessly insane. 188 ch.xliv A GENIUS DISCOVERED DEAD 189 Of several fine pastels from Perronneau's hands, difficult to date, are such masterpieces as his portrait of J. B. Oudry, seated before his easel, his palette on thumb ; the J. C. Dutillieu ; the portrait of Benoite Sacquin ; and the superb Portrait of a Lady belonging to M. Paul Mame. In 1783 Perronneau was in Holland again for the third and last time. For, there, on the 1 9th of November, the curtain is lifted from the mystery of his restless wayfaring in solemn fashion, displaying a strange little scene. The sieur Jean Martens stands before the secretary of the town of Amsterdam, announcing that " the sieur Jean Baptiste Perronneau, of no particular profession, aged forty-two (?), living in the Heerengracht, near the Leidschestraat, is dead of the fever." Perronneau died in an inn amongst the haunts of the rich ; he was buried amongst the poor ! About poor Perronneau always the mysteries. He left two young sons to his widow, who, in accord with the wish of the dead man, married forthwith a second time, on the 17th of February 1784, J. B. Claude Robin, who had entered the Academy in 1 772 (twelve years before) , the painter of the great ceiling of the theatre at Bordeaux. Perronneau's art and his reputation went down in the mighty flood of the Revolution, that was to overwhelm La Tour and Chardin and the rest ; and we may be sure that, when three francs were bid for La Tour's Rousseau and twenty-four francs for Chardin's Portrait of himself in pastels (18 10), poor Perronneau's name had well-nigh come to be forgotten altogether. His many unnamed portraits will never be wholly discovered. But he with his fellows has come into his own again, though the glory of it brings small comfort to the restless, neglected, sensitive soul whose vision and skill of hand wrought the masterpiece with such agony of toil. Perronneau cannot be said to be the peer of La Tour ; but if he lack the force and fire of the greater Other, he had qualities, exquisite and delicate and true, which should have kept his name from the i9o THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch.xliv vulgarities of the neglect that fell upon it. His wife remained less than three months a widow ; and his sons left no record of him, nor raised any witness to his memory. His restless, wandering, and buffeted spirit took him roving over strange lands in quest of success, only to lose him thereby that fame in the capital that was a necessity to honours and rewards in France. xxxv MARQUISE DE CRUSSOLLS by vig£e le brun {Private Collection) CHAPTER XLV WHEREIN WE DISCOVER TWO WOMEN SEIZING EACH A FORTIETH PART OF IMMORTALITY In the year of 1783, in which they found Perronneau, master of pastels, lying dead in an inn, there were admitted to the Forty of the Academy, amidst considerable enthusiasm, in the month of May, two women whose art had an astounding vogue in France towards the end of the seventeen-hundreds — Adelaide Labille-Guiard was the one, Elizabeth Vigee le Brun the other. Both gifted women came into fame at an early age. Both painted the great personages of their day. Both were pre-eminent painters of the age of Louis the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette. Elizabeth Vigee le Brun achieved fame as a painter of portraits in oils, and her achievement in pastels was but that of one who rarely employed them, except, odd to say, in some couple of hundred landscapes made in Switzerland in her later career. But Adelaide Labille-Guiard wrought portraits largely in pastels, and arrived at consummate accomplishment in them. Madame Guiard, sometimes known by her maiden name of Labille, better known by both her maiden and her married name as Madame Labille-Guiard, was born in Paris on the 1 1 th of April 1749. A pupil of the Vincents, she, as well as Elizabeth Vigee le Brun, was admitted to the Academy of Saint Luke ; and later, on the 3rd of May 1783, at the same time as Elizabeth Vigee le Brun, she was elected to the Royal Academy. She showed portraits at the Salons of 1783, 1785, 1787, 1789, 1791, 1795, 1798, 1799, and 1800. She had a wide vogue, painting, in oils and pastels, many of the royal family, the nobility, artists, and 191 192 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xlv public men of the Louis Seize Court ; just as had Elizabeth Vigee le Brun ; but she clung to Paris at the Revolution, when Elizabeth Vigee le Brun fled before the storm ; and it so came that her vogue continued in Paris, so that we see the titles of her Great Ones change from Highness and noble rank to plain Citizen This and Citizeness That. But the lists of her contributions to the Academy are so often set under the futile heading of Several portraits painted in oils or pastels under the same number, that anything approaching a full list of her works sent thereto baffles discovery. She painted M. Rajou modelling the portrait of Lemoyne, his master, and Amedie van Loo as her pieces-of-reception into the Academy. Amongst her most celebrated pastel portraits are the Madame Victoire (of France) ; the Viscount de Gand and the Viscountess de Gand ; she painted also the famous portraits of the Duchess of Narbonne, and the Marquise de la Valette, playing a harp. Robespierre sat to her ; as did M. de Beauharnais and Talleyrand-Perigord for portraits in pastel. It is after 1794 that the titles cease in the labels to her pictures, and citoyen and citoyenne take their place. She married a second time ; though, as Madame Vincent, she is not known to fame as an artist. Adelaide Labille-Guiard died in Paris on the 8th of April 1803. XXXVI MADAME VICTOIRE BY LABILLE GUIARD {Louvre) CHAPTER XLVI WHEREIN OLD AGE SETS STRAWS IN THE HAIR OF GENIUS About his seventieth year, La Tour began that dabbling in medicines and the physicking of himself which did his health small good. And, like most such self-quacks, he was not content with his nostrums, but was for ever persuading others to try them, entering into heated disputes over the business. He took it into his head that "fasting- water " was a cure for all evils ; and, to urge his victims to it, he was wont to declare that with a little practice one could drink two pints a day of the nasty stuff. La Tour was failing. His art was falling into neglect. He realised that he was an old man. He set about making a will. In the rough-draft of this will in 1783, in his eightieth year, he left Mademoiselle Fel for her lifetime all that he possessed at Chaillot, except his famous telescope by Dolland. He was now passing into a morbid state of mind, and his thoughts were becoming mixed and disjointed. He forbade his body being buried in Paris, as he did not wish to poison that city ; he named more than sixty of his friends and colleagues to whom he wished to leave their portraits or their miniatures. His old friends were at first embarrassed, then grieved, to see that his reason was giving way. A few months afterwards his wits deserted him, and he had to leave willingly or by force his lodgings at the Louvre for the house at Chaillot ; whence, becoming a source of distress to Marie Fel, his step-brother, with tact and kindness, persuaded him to leave 193 2 c 194 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. for Saint Quentin and return to his own people, in order to be nearer to him, that he might receive the care which he needed. La Tour's fortune had enabled him to endow charities for good works. The repute of his fame as a painter was not unknown in the humdrum streets of his own little town. His arrival was made the object of a public reception ; and he entered the town amidst the cheers of the citizens, being received with great enthusiasm. The people left their work and made holiday — they burnt much gunpowder in the local cannon, church-bells pealed, gaiety and rejoicing were abroad. The town-council, with the mayor and aldermen, rendered him an address of welcome ; and the man who had refused a royal order was proud of the gift of a garland of oak-leaves. Night saw the public places illuminated. Indeed, had not their celebrated towns man walked and laughed and talked, and been hail-fellow, with Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau, with Diderot and D'Alembert ? Had he not been one of those who had prophesied the new order of things that was coming to the land ? He went to live near his soldier-brother. It was a provincial existence, tranquil and without undue enliven- ment. To such a life, few townsmen can go without a sense of loss. To the eager will of La Tour it must have been a trial, even in the spent years of old age, had he been his sane self. But less than three weeks after the old artist's arrival in his native town, his brother had to get a statute of lunacy drawn out against him ; it was granted on the 9th of July 1784. Marie Fel could not follow him thither. Why, both being free, they had not gone through the religious or civil form of marriage passes understanding. But to go to a provincial town, as the mad old artist's mistress, was impossible. The woman's common sense saw that clearly. The proprieties ruled the laws of life in Saint Quentin, be sure, even in the careless days of Louis the Well-Beloved, as much as in any provincial class anywhere to-day. Yet La Tour's kin were kind to the great singer. She had for life the furnishments of La Tour's home ; she lived with her beloved possessions at Chaillot, with her memories of great days ; and it is to xlvi STRAWS IN THE HAIR OF GENIUS 195 the eternal honour of La Tour's knightly brother and of his kin that they allowed her the pleasure and the comfort of them. This soldier-brother wrote to her with a brother's care and affection and generosity. When all else was gone, the one sole object that kept possession ofthe old painter's wits was the woman he loved. Those about the old artist assured the heart-hungry man that she had not forgotten him — that she constantly wrote for news of him, but that she could not attempt the long journey of forty leagues from Paris to Saint Quentin. Of the proprieties they were silent. Thus the old man remained alone, dreaming of his " divinity," " La Celeste," as he was wont to call her. But slowly the light went flickering and guttering in the lamp of his life. Happily, the old brain fell into visions of a world filled with great men and women of supreme beauty, amongst whom he lived as though they were a reality, enjoying their wit and charm. Thus for four years La Tour crept gently into second infancy ; his philosophic tribulations passed away with his reason ; and the old church of his boyhood called his wandering footsteps home to the ancient altar of his early faith. During the last two years of his life the intellect was wholly gone from him. Now and again a spark struck out of the darkness at the mention of the name of Marie Fel ; or moved the kindly heart to acts of well-doing. The gossip testimony of Bucelly d'Estrees remains to tell us how he has seen the old man, shuffling down the streets, stop when the sun shone out, bringing back life to the sluggish blood, and speak to the trees, embracing them with his arms and saying, " Soon thou shalt be good for warming the poor." On the 17th of February 1788, in his eighty-fourth year, death came stealing into the old artist's room and took Maurice Quentin de La Tour gently ; so passed away his fiery and grim spirit in the fulness of his years, and his mortal body was buried with his kin in the graveyard of the church of Saint Andre. . . . Liotard was seventy years of age, the " Turk " all gone out of him, 196 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch.xlvi a very Frenchman, when, packing up a large collection of the old masters and many of the works of his own skilful hands, he passed over into England again, to the scene of his old triumphs (1772). These treasures he sold in London at very great profit — indeed picture- dealing with Liotard, as with Voltaire, was a profitable business. To the Royal Academy of 1773 and of 1774 he sent portraits and crayon- drawings. But the years were beginning to stoop the big figure of the handsome fellow ; in 1776 he bade farewell to England and made for his native town of Geneva, with his wife and children. There he worked steadily at his art and various crafts until death took him, on the 2 ist of September 1789. His eyes closed on a September that filled France with turmoil. But Liotard had never greatly concerned himself with the troubles of France. A good colourist, working on glass, or porcelain, or in enamel, or whatever came to his hand — not least of all are his etchings — he will be remembered probably above all for his exquisite gifts in the art of pastel, not only for his figure -subjects but for his landscapes, in which he displayed a sense of the value of light which is astoundingly modern. And his pastel, whether in landscape or portraiture, was so skilfully employed that it retains its brilliant colouring and touch almost as though it had been set down but yesterday. His twin-brother, J. M. Liotard, became famous as an engraver of paintings, after Boucher, Watteau, and the masters of his day. CHAPTER XLVII WHEREIN A KING CANNOT FIND EVEN AN ATTIC TO CALL HIS OWN ; AND HEARS A DEAD MAN's BODY HAILED BY HIS PEOPLE IN HIS STEAD But there was a black, a vast shadow came looming over the land — a threat that boded ill for such as were lords of France. In an unfortunate moment for the Royal House, and against the will of the King and of Neckar, the nation went mad with excitement and enthusiasm over the revolt of England's American colonies ; and the alliance was formed that France solemnly swore not to sever until America was declared independent. It started the war with England. The successes of the revolted colonies made the coming of the Revolution a certainty in France. The fall of Neckar and the rise of the new minister Calonne sent France rushing to the abyss. The distress of the people became unbearable. The royal family and the Court sank in the nation's respect, and the people were no longer the people of the decade before ; they had watched the Revolution in America, read the thrilling lines and echoed the splendid sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, and had seen the Revolution victorious. The fall of the egregious Calonne only led to the rise of the turbulent and stupid Cardinal de Brienne ; and the Court was com pletely foul of the people when De Brienne threw up office in a panic amidst a nation in the black temper of riot, and fled across the frontier, leaving the Government in utter confusion. The reign of Cardinals was at an end in France for ever. The King recalled Neckar. The calling of the States-General 197 198 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch.xlvii now became assured. Paris rang with the exultation of the Third Estate. The States-General met at Versailles on the 5th of May 1789. The Monarchy was at an end. In little more than a month the States-General created itself the National Assembly. The Revolution was begun. The 14th of July saw the fall of the Bastille. On the 22nd, the people hanged Foulon to the street-lamp at the corner of the Place de Greve — and a la lanterne ! became the cry of fashion. Two years afterwards the body of the dead Voltaire was borne in state through Paris in a sarcophagus, and received with exultant revolutionary enthusiasm. The Marquis de Villette, now a keen Republican, had suggested it. And amidst great pomp it was taken to the Parthenon — " Belle et Bonne," with her little girl, and two of the Calas family, being in the procession. At the recall of the Bourbons, in 18 14, a gang of Royalists and Catholic zealots went, at dead of night, and taking the bodies of Voltaire and Rousseau from their lead coffins, buried them before daylight in a piece of waste-ground by Bercy. De Villette's ardent republicanism was cooled by the Massacres of September ; and he voted against the death of Louis XVI. He only escaped the guillotine at the beginning of the Terror by dying in July 1793. "Belle et Bonne" escaped the Terror, and lived until 1822, the centre of a brilliant circle, and a worshipper of the memory of Voltaire. She had watched by the dying man's bedside, and she bore witness to his great benevolence of character to the end — his death in peace and resignation, except for that one touch of ill-humour when, fretted by the effort of the priest to make him confess, he signed to him to begone and uttered his " Let me die in peace ! " XXXVII HEAD OF A GIRL ARTIST UNKNOWN {At Amiens Museum) CHAPTER XLVIII WHICH RAISES THE CURTAIN UPON A STORM, A NIGHTMARE, THE TERROR, AND A MIGHTY DAWN It was the custom of the Royal Academy to utter an eulogy of an artist at his death ; but when La Tour died, even the artists were deafened by the coming thunderstorm that threatened all France. On the 23rd of the February of 1788, six days after La Tour passed away, the Royal Academy registered the fact of his death, hurriedly and formally enough, since no speech was delivered in his praise. Indeed, La Tour had already passed amongst the ancients, and was well-nigh forgotten. He died in that year that saw all France sullenly clamouring for the calling of the States-General ; his dying eyes were to close upon a France almost within sight of the promised land. When he lay still in death, the Royal Academy, in alarm at the storm that threatened Paris, were too taken up with the dangers which threatened at their very doors, and forgot to render La Tour this official homage, which was his by right, of a fortieth part of Immortality. La Tour was scarce inhis grave a year when the States-General met — constituted itself the National Assembly — and kingship fell from France. The rose of the dawn upon which he had looked, though his eyes closed before the sun came up, must have startled the men who had held out their arms to the light — it soon turned blood-red. It came up behind threatening black clouds, that broke with a roar upon Paris. It came responsive to the rattle of musketry in the Far West, hard by Boston Harbour. The storm of the Revolution burst, and swept away the art of the 199 200 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. seventeen-hundreds, with all the other landmarks of France's ancient state. In the wide ruin, the art of La Tour and his fellows, good and bad, went down. Against France's ancient state came blow upon blow, quick- hammered and rending — the unfortunate death of Mirabeau ; the Queen's mad enmity to Lafayette ; the hesitations of the King ; his foolish flight to Varenne ; his arrest, and the arrest of the royal family with him. The constitutional party in the Legislative Assembly, at first dominant, became subject to the more violent but more able Girondists, with their extreme wing of Jacobins under Robespierre, and Cordeliers under Danton, Marat, Camille Desmoulins, and Fabre d'Eglantine. The Queen's insane enmity towards Lafayette finished the King's business. On the night of the 9th of August the dread Tocsin sounded the note of doom to the Royal cause — herald to the awful bloodshed of the morrow. Three days afterwards, the King and the royal family were prisoners in the Temple. The National Convention met for the first time on the 21st of September 1792 ; decreed the First Year of the Republic ; abolished royalty and the titles of courtesy, decreeing in their place citoyen and citoyenne, and the use of tu and toi for vous. The meeting also discovered the enmity of the two wings of the now all-powerful Girondist party — the Girondists and the Jacobins, or Montagnards. The conflict began with a quarrel as to whether the King could be tried. The 10th of January 1793 saw the King's head fall to the guillotine — the Jacobins had triumphed. War with Europe followed ; and the deadly struggle set in between the Girondists and Jacobins for supreme power. The 27th of May witnessed the appointment of the terrible and secret Committee of Public Safety. By June the Girondists had wholly fallen. Charlotte Corday's stabbing of Marat in his bath left the way clear for Robespierre's ambition. The Jacobins in power, the year of the Reign of Terror began — July 1793 to July 1794 — with Robespierre as the lord ofthe hellish business. xlviii THE TERROR 201 The scaffolds reeked with blood — from that of Marie Antoinette, once Queen, now " the widow Capet " ; from that of Egalite d'Orleans, who had voted with the majority for his kinsman the King's death ; from the Girondist deputies and Madame Roland, to the most insignificant beggar of the streets, suspected of the vague charge of " hostility to the Republic." In a mad moment the Du Barry, who had shown the noblest side of her character in befriending the old allies of her bygone days of greatness, published a public notice of a theft from her house — it drew all eyes to her wealth ; she too went to the guillotine, shrieking with terror, and betraying all who had befriended and protected her, in the hopes of saving her own neck from the knife. Then came strife amongst the Jacobins. Robespierre and Danton fought the scoundrel Hebert for life, and overthrew him ; the Hebertists went to the guillotine, dying in abject terror. Danton, with his appeals for cessation of the bloodshed of the Terror, alone stood between Robespierre and supreme power — Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Fabre d'Eglantine and their humane fellows were sent to the guillotine. No man knew when or where the blow might fall — at what place or moment he might be seized, or on what charge, and sent to death. But able and resolute men had determined that Robespierre and the Terror must end. Robespierre went to the guillotine. The Revolution of the Ninth Thermidor put an end to the Terror in July 1794. All this time the armies of France had been winning the respect of the world by their gallantry and skill in war. The 23rd of September 1795 saw France set up the Directory ; the 5th of October, the Day of Sections, witnessed a stiff fight about the church of St. Roch, and a young commander of men, one Napoleon Bonaparte, appointed second-in-command of the army about Paris. The young general was soon commander-in-chief. And France thenceforth advanced, spite of the many blunderings of the Directory, with all the 2 D 202 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. xlviii splendid genius of her race, to the recovery of her fortunes, and to a greatness which was to be the wonder and admiration and dread of the world. The Revolution of the 18th and 19th Brumaire (9th and 10th of November 1797) brought the Directory toppling down, and set the people's idol, Napoleon Bonaparte, at the helm of her mighty State. Thenceforth she was to march to victory after victory. XXXVIII DUC D'ANGOULEME BY BOZE {Louvre) CHAPTER XLIX WHICH HAS TO DO WITH THE FALL OF THE BLOSSOMED ROSE And " the seductive Fel " ! She lived on, in friendly correspondence with her lover's kin and friends. She kept to the last the strength of personality of which old age had filched the force from her lover. The new thought and the new religion of Humanity and of Justice remained with her to the end ; the letter she writes to a judge, Cambronne-Huet of Saint Quentin, on his hiring her a servant-girl, bears witness to this. Old age withered her once-beautiful flesh, and death took her mortal body ; but the pastel that was her lover's glory, the fragile exquisite tints of the coloured dust, keep her beauty and her gracious spirit alive ; and they will live as long as the Confessions and the name of Rousseau who wrote them live — as long as endures the exquisite pastel that limned her, and the memory of the consummate artist who wrought the perfect thing. All that was mortal of her passed away in the February of 1794, amidst the fierce whirlwind and black nightmare of the Terror. She played a part in a brilliantly illumined and romantic drama that shows bright and clear in a wondrously romantic age, herself a very creature of romance, one of the world's immortal lovers ; she walked with the " citizen of Geneva," and loved and was loved of one of the greatest artists that France has known. Her sweet and gracious being blossoms like a beautiful flower in a strange place for a woman's betterment, where she was exposed now to every violent gust, now warmed with the dangerous splendours of frantic admiration. A petal or so dropped from the gracious bud of her young woman- 203 204 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch. hood at its unfolding, but the gentle rain of forgiveness has washed her white, for the full flower of the blossoming of her loyalty and faithfulness made clean the soul of her wayward lover, and purified it — and in the purifying she came herself near to the angels. Marie Fel needs no monument of stone to keep her memory green. To-day Saint Quentin claims her, with pride of possession, as a part of the glory of their gifted townsman, so that her gracious spirit sits enthroned in the heart of the town. . . . The reputation of La Tour, in spite of his great vogue whilst he lived, in spite of his kinship with the philosophic thought that created the French Revolution, went down in the great flood, together with those of Boucher, and Fragonard, and Chardin, and Greuze, and the rest of the goodly company. The first public tribute paid to the dead genius was delivered by the Abbe du Plaquet, chaplain to the church of Saint Quentin, on the 2nd of May 1788, shortly after the artist's death — the day of the distribution of prizes at the free school of drawing founded by the dead man. Thereafter, a vast silence. In 1834, M. de Bucelly d'Estrees unburdened himself of much gossip of him; but it was only in 1850 that La Tour's art was again seriously considered. The researches of keen admirers of his genius, such as the judgments and untiring industry of Tourneux, have lifted much of the fog from his achievement ; but there remains a mist over his career and his accomplishment. The gap wherein the work of his youth is lost in the unrecorded years before Louis the Fifteenth's first Salon opened in 1737, and the rare appearance ofhis pictures at public auction, make for difficulties in following the history of his hand's skill. The neglect which fell upon his art before the breath had left his demented being, swallowed his fame ; and, as early as 1 8 1 1 , twenty-five of his sketches were flung into one lot at auction, together with forty drawings by La Rue, at the Pierre Lelut sale ! In 1826 the portrait of Crebillon pere went under the hammer for thirty francs xlix FALL OF THE BLOSSOMED ROSE 205 (one pound five shillings) ! And even as late as 1873 the two sketches for Sihestre and Dumont le Romain went to the highest bidder at three hundred francs (about twelve guineas). But La Tour has come into his kingdom. To-day, when his rare pastels are set up in the Hotel Drouot or the Galerie Georges- Petit, they rouse bids that would have astonished even the man who created them — and he held no low estimate of their value. Who so ignorant in these days as to ask : Who is La Tour ? Diderot's " Great Magician " stands amongst the great eighteenth-century masters of France. And he deserves so to stand — he is worthy of his bays. The allegory, to which his forerunners only too greatly sacrificed the truth of portraiture, he shed from him. He replaced it with a truer atmosphere of the sitter's calling and activity. He searched for the character of the person he limned — his king wears the air of kingship, his artists are artists, his soldiers soldiers. He was content to show them in their habit as they lived, in the surroundings amidst which they moved. He brought back to the portrait its realities, its subtleties ; and, in the doing, he founded his art on a more poetic foundation than the mock ecstasies of an unreal sentimentality or a pretended romanticism. What skill of mortal hand could surpass that wondrous mask that La Tour wrought in the Strauss Voltaire, of him who mocked away the rotten fabric of his age ? How they all live again, from king and philosopher to clown and dancing-girl, these famous ones, who tripped across the boards of France's fantastic drama of the seventeen-hundreds, quickened by the pastel's stroke, wrought by the nervous fingers that recorded, in consummate fashion, the vision of Maurice Quentin de La Tour ! CHAPTER L OF THE PASSING OF THE PASTEL With Maurice Quentin de La Tour passed away the pastel of the great age in France. Others, 'tis true, employed it in casual fashion, as though in relaxation from more serious occupation with the canvas ; but that the pastel had for front of its achievement the artistry of La Tour is best proven by the simple fact that, until a while ago, every pastel portrait of fine achievement in the seventeen-hundreds was crudely set down to the skill of La Tour's hand. The time is gone by when every eighteenth-century pastel portrait was attributed to La Tour, every fete champetre to Watteau, every classical landscape to Claude Lorraine, every pastoral to Boucher — as the time has gone by when every smug Madonna pulled down Raphael's reputation, and Murillo was dowered with the whole genius of Spain. Other painters of the age of Louis the Fifteenth and Louis the Sixteenth wrought in pastel, and wrought the perfect thing ; but most of these came to chief fame in the realm of the painted canvas, or in the exquisite making of the miniature — the pastel, though beautifully handled by them, was in the main an aside from more serious labour. Of such were Nattier, who in his later years brought occasionally to pastel the aristocratic vision and sense of style that distinguished all he did. Francois Hubert Drouais, who, born in Paris in 1727 and died therein in 1775, trained by his father, Hubert Drouais the portrait- painter, became a pupil of Nonotte, then of Carle van Loo, then of Natoire, then of Boucher, to be elected to the Academy in 1758, and become a Court painter of polished style and exquisite technique, his 206 XXXIX, nation PORTRAIT OF A LADY BY LA TOUR {Collection ofthe Marquise de Ganay) ch.l OF THE PASSING OF THE PASTEL 207 delicatesse in oils being largely refined by his practice of the pastel, so that his portraits of the royal family and of most of the celebrities and beauties of the day wear a patrician air of breeding that Drouais alone seemed to catch in all its subtlety and refinement ; there seemed something fitting in that he should die the year after the small-pox took Louis the Well-Beloved and sent the Du Barry, whom his pencil limned, a-packing. Joseph Sifrede Duplessis also, who, born at Carpentras near Avignon in 1725, and intended for the priesthood, early displayed his gift of art ; so that his father, Duplessis the elder, an artist, taught the lad, sending him thereafter to Frere Imbert, no mean painter, whatever as priest ; thence he went a-roaming into Italy, studying there under Subleyras, to return a while to Lyons, whence he soon made for Paris, to be at last received into the Academy in 1774, on the edge of his fiftieth year ; but who, losing his all in the Revolution, was at last rewarded with ease of days in modest fashion as Conservator of the Museum at Versailles, where he passed away in 1 802. Ducreux, too, Joseph of that name, painter of portraits, born at Nancy in 1737, who died in Paris in 1791, amidst the roar of the Revolution that sent ruin amongst the artists. Greuze also, though rarely, used the pastel — as did less rarely the miniaturist Hall ; and Claude Jean Baptiste Hoin, the painter and engraver, who, born at Dijon in 1750, became a pupil first of Devosge, then of Greuze, and a member of the Academies of Toulouse and of Dijon, at which last he died in 1 8 17, being Keeper of the Museum, to which he bequeathed several pictures. Simon Bernard Lenoir, moreover, who, born Parisian, died in Paris (1729- 178 9) ; nor must a lady be forgot, since Marie Suzanne Giroust, the Swedish painter Roslin's wife, better known as Madame Roslin, came to distinction with her pastel portraits (1735-1772). Lastly, Joseph Boze, born at Les Martigues (Bouches- du-Rhone) about 1746, who painted Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette; and, devoted to the Royal House and the Court, came near thereby to leaving his head in the basket of the guillotine— the fall of Robespierre opening the gates of his prison, where the shadow of death had walked his cell ; but Boze crept out into the streets of 208 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS ch.l Paris with uneasy eyes, and skipped over to England until France knew her kings again, dying in Paris in 1826. You may see his portrait at the Louvre, painted as he saw himself. Others there were after La Tour, though these uttered a different art, and employed the pastel in far different fashion, a man of genius, Pierre Prud'hon, being the man of transition ; since, born in 1758, he was thirty-one when the States-General met — little more than on the edge of manhood when La Tour's wits ceased from guiding the cunning of the hand that had been supreme in pastel. Prud'hon's art, whether on the painted canvas or with the pastel, breathes already the classic atmosphere of the Revolution, even though the charm of the art of Boucher has not wholly departed from it. But he reached manhood when fickle fashion had turned her back on La Tour and Chardin — upon all that was best and great in the art of the eighteenth century of the Louis, as well as upon all that was not best and great. And, be it marked well, as long as the art of the seventeen-hundreds in France endures — and endure it will, and come back into its heritage — the art of Chardin and La Tour will endure and hold pre-eminence ; for they wrought the masterpiece, and with consummate gifts of hand and eye, and astounding craftsmanship. XL PORTRAIT OF A LADY BY LA TOUR {At Orleans Museum) POSTSCRIPT WHICH TELLS OF AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN As long as the fame of the pastel lasts, as long as the name of Maurice Quentin de La Tour lasts — with all the manifold stories of his whims and moods and fantastic adventures in the strange world in which he lived — and his name will last as long as the history of the pastel in eighteenth -century France — so long will the chivalrous personality of his young step-brother, the gallant lieutenant of cavalry, go down to fame alongside of his, the order of St. Louis glittering upon his breast. As the old artist died unmarried, leaving but rough drafts of his will, and mad, his estate devolved upon his only surviving brother, Francois de La Tour. The tenderness of this man to his stricken brother, and to the famous artist's mistress in her old age, glows like a beacon-light amidst the selfish habits of his day. His large heart saw to it that the fortune that came from his brother should be so administered as to fulfil that brother's ideals and aims. Twenty years after Maurice Quentin de La Tour cancelled his former wills, it was Jean Francois de La Tour who fulfilled those cancelled wills, as though they still held in the law, towards his kinsfolk and their offspring. He lived until the 14th of March 1807, and at his death appointed his cousin, the Abbe Duliege, his executor. The works of art that had come to him from his brother he willed to be sold in Paris, to increase the sums with which the artist had endowed his several charities ; but Duliege, when he tried in 18 12 to fulfil the wishes of the dead man, had to withdraw the first portrait 209 2 E 210 THE FRENCH PASTELLISTS put up, that of Rousseau, at three francs ; and that of Mondonville, which called forth no higher bid. The Abbe and municipality had the sound judgment thereafter to withdraw from the sale. The room in which they were first hung has been changed ; the collection has seen many adventures, and it is clearly not as complete as it was left by the great pastellist's brother. Where is La Condamine ? where the four Mesdames de France ? Where that second portrait of Mondonville ? Why had Marie Leczinska been offered to the Duchesse d'Angouleme ? Why were the Louis XV., the Abbe le Blanc, and the Jean Monet replaced by copies ? What act of folly caused the name to be torn from the pastels, when setting them into elaborate gilt frames out of the plain black wood in which La Tour himself had placed them ? These queries have been fought over by the first experts in France ; and who shall decide between the judges ? Endless con fusion, at least, has resulted. The Museum at Saint Quentin is the shrine of the pastel. La Tour's sketches for his masterpieces hang upon the walls to give a hint of the man's splendid achievement. Those pastels are the pride and glory of the town. It must not be forgotten that even these things give but a hint of the artist's genius. There hang at Saint Quentin to-day these pastels by La Tour (the spelling is official !) : — A Boy Drinking. Diogenes. D'Argenson. Duclos. Madame du Barry (so-called). Dupeuch. Madame Bofitte de Saint-Leger. Pere Emmanuel. Le Due de Bourgogne. Madame Favart. Le Bailli de Breteuil. Mademoiselle Fel. Mademoiselle Camargo. Forbonnais. Chardin. The Man with the Long Beard. D'Alembert. L'Abbe Hubert. Mademoiselle Dangeville. Julienne. Dachery — two Portraits. La Poupliniere. La Tour, by himself, as well as the Madame de la Poupliniere. La Tour by Perronneau. La Reyniere. POSTSCRIPT 211 L'Abbe le Blanc. Louis, Dauphin. Louis XV. The Marshal de Lowendal. Manelli. Sylvestre. Marie Leszczynska. Charles Maron. Madame Masse. Jean Monnet — two Portraits. Montmartel. De Neuville. Parrocel.L'Abbe Pommyer. La Pompadour. La Pompadour (No. 2). Mademoiselle Puvigny. Restout. Madame Rougeau. Jean Jacques Rousseau. Madame Roussel. Christine de Saxe. Le Marechal de Saxe. Marie Josephe de Saxe — two Portraits of the Dauphiness. Marie Josephe de Saxe and the Due de Bourgogne. Xavier de Saxe. Clement de Saxe. Eleven Heads of Unknown Women Eight Heads of Unknown Men Four Studies of Heads. Young Girl with a Dove. Young Girl with a Crown. La Tete Penchee. Madame de Tuyll. Vernezobre.Belle de Zuylen (Isabella Agneta Elizabeth Van Tuyll, who became Madame de Charriere). The -Nineteen Unknowns. And here, at the little town of Saint Quentin, in northern France, will ever be the shrine of such as work with the pastel. For, even though La Tour's greatest masterpieces are elsewhere, it is here that those magic deft essayings of his skill of hand are gathered together, as in no other place they may be seen ; here that he was born and bred and sinned and aspired ; here that he died — the greatest master of it all, the giant of its achievement. THE END Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.