MASTERPIECES
IN COLOUR

EDITED BY . .
T. LEMAN HARE

FRAGONARD

In the Same Series

In Preparation

Fragonard

BY HALDANE MACFALL
ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT
REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

[Pg vi]

TO

MY FRIEND

WALTER EMANUEL

[Pg vii]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[Pg 9]

I

THE BEGINNINGS

High up, amongst the Sea-Alps that stretch
along the southern edge of France, where
romantic Provence bathes her sunburnt feet in
the blue waters of the Mediterranean, high on
the mountain’s side hangs the steep little town
of Grasse, embowered midst grey-green olive-trees.
In as sombre a narrow street as there is[Pg 10]
in all her dark alleys, on the fifth day of April
in the much bewigged and powdered year of
1732, there was born to a glovemaker of the
town, worthy mercer Fragonard, a boy-child,
whom the priest in the gloomy church christened
Jean Honoré Fragonard.

As the glovemaker looked out of his sombre
house over the sunlit slopes of the grey-green
olive-trees that stretched away to the deep blue
waters of the sea, he vowed his child to commerce
and a thrifty life in this far-away country place
that was but little vexed with the high ambitions
of distant, fickle, laughing Paris, or her splendid
scandals; nay, scarce gave serious thought
to her gadding fashions or her feverish vogues—indeed,
the attenuated ghosts of these once
frantic things wriggled southwards through the
provinces on but sluggish feet to the high promenades
of Grasse—as the worthy mercer was first
in all the little town to know by his modest traffic
in them; and that, too, only long after the things
they shadowed were buried under new millineries
and fopperies and fantastic riot in the gay capital.
As a fact, the dark-eyed, long-nosed folk that
trudged these steep and narrow thoroughfares
were a sluggish people; and sunlit Grasse snored
away its day in drowsy fashion.[Pg 11]

But if the room where the child first saw the
light were gloomy enough within, the skies were
wondrous blue without, and the violet-scented
slopes were robed in a tender garment of silvery
green, decked with the gold of orange-trees, and
enriched with bright embroidery of many-coloured
flowers that were gay as the gayest ribbons of
distant Paris. And the glory of it bathed the lad’s
eyes and heart for sixteen years, so that his hands
got them itching to create the splendour of it which
sang within him; and the wizardry of the flower-garden
of France never left him, casting its spell
over all his thinking, and calling to him to utter
it to the world. It stole into his colour-box, and
on to his palette, and so across the canvas into
his master-work, and was to lead him through
the years to a blithe immortality.

The small boy with the big head was born in
the year after François Boucher came back to
Paris from his Italian wanderings on the eve of
his thirties and won to academic honour. The
child grew up in his Provençal home, whilst
Boucher, turning his back upon academic art on
gaining his seat at the Academy, was creating
the Pastorals, Venus-pieces, and Cupid-pieces
that changed the whole style of French art from
the pompous and mock-heroic manner of Louis[Pg 12]
Quatorze’s century of the sixteen hundreds to the
gay and elegant pleasaunces that fitted so aptly
the elegant pleasure-seeking days of Louis the
Fifteenth’s seventeen hundreds.

Gossip of high politics came trickling down
to Grasse as slowly as the fashions, yet the
eleven-year-old boy’s ears heard of the death of
the minister, old Cardinal Fleury, and of the
effort of Louis to become king by act. Though
Louis had small genius for the mighty business,
and fell thenceforth into the habit of ruling
France from behind petticoats, raising the
youngest of the daughters of the historic and
noble house of De Nesle to be his accepted consort
under the rank and honours of Duchess of
Chateauroux. All tongues tattled of the business,
the very soldiery singing mocking songs; when—Louis
strutting it as conqueror with the army, got
the small-pox at Metz, and sent the Chateauroux
packing at the threat of death. He recovered,
to enter Paris soon after as the Well-Beloved,
and to be reconciled with the frail Chateauroux
before she died in the sudden agony in which
she swore she had been poisoned.

At thirteen the boy listened to the vague
rumours of a new scandal that set folk’s tongues
wagging again throughout all France. The
[Pg 15]
king raised Madame Lenormant d’Etioles, a
daughter of the rich financier class, to be Marquise
de Pompadour, and yielded up to her the
sceptre over his people.

The nations, weary of war, agreed to sign the
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. In this, our
artist’s sixteenth year, the Pompadour had been
the king’s acknowledged mistress for three years.
From this time, the peace being signed, Louis
the Fifteenth laid aside all effort to fulfil the
duties of the lord over a great people; gave himself
up to shameless and riotous living, and
allowed the Pompadour to usurp the splendour
of his throne and to rule over the land.

For the next sixteen years she was the most
powerful person at court, the greatest personality
in the State—making and unmaking
ministers like a sovereign, and disposing of high
offices, honours, titles, and pensions. The king
squandered upon her some seventy odd millions
of the public money as money is now valued.
Her energy and her industry must have been
colossal. Her intelligence saved the king from
the boredom of decision in difficult affairs. She
made herself a necessity to his freedom from care.
Every affair of State was discussed and settled
under her guidance. Ministers, ambassadors,[Pg 16]
generals, transacted their business in her handsome
boudoirs. She dispensed the whole patronage
of the sovereign with her pretty hands.
The prizes of the army, of the church, of the
magistracy, could only be secured through her
good-will. As though these things were not
load enough to bow the shoulders of any one
human being she kept a rein upon every national
activity. She created the porcelain factory of
Sèvres, thereby adding a lucrative industry to
France. She founded the great military school
of Saint Cyr. She mothered every industry. She
was possessed of a rare combination of talents
and accomplishments, and of astounding taste.
But her deepest affection was for the arts.

The Pompadour had gathered about her, as
the beautiful Madame d’Etioles, the supreme
wits and artists and thinkers of her day; Voltaire
and Boucher and Latour and the rest were her
friends, and the new thought that was being
born in France was nursed in her drawing-rooms.
As the Pompadour she kept up her
friendships. She was prodigal in her encouragement
of the arts, in the furnishment of her own
and the king’s palaces and castles. And it was
in the exercise and indulgence of her better
qualities that she brought out the genius and[Pg 17]
encouraged to fullest achievement the art of
Boucher, and of the great painters of her time.
So Boucher brought to its full blossom the art
that Watteau had created—the picture of “Fêtes
galentès”—and added to the artistic achievement
of France the Pastorals wherein Dresden shepherds
and shepherdesses dally in pleasant landscapes,
and the Venus-pieces wherein Cupids
flutter and romp—a world of elegance and charm
presided over by the Goddess of Love.

II

ROME

All this was but Paris-gossip amidst the olive-trees
and steep streets of far-away Grasse, where
the large-headed, small-bodied lad was idling
through his fifteen summers, living and breathing
the beauty of the pleasant land of romance
that bred him, when, like bolt from the blue,
fell the news upon him that his father, tearing
aside the fabric of the lad’s dreams, had articled
him as junior clerk to a notary.

But the French middle-class ideal of respectability
meant no heaven for this youth’s goal,
no ultimate aim for his ambition. He idled his
master into despair; “wasting his time” on[Pg 18]
paint-pots and pencil-scribblings until that honest
man himself advised that the lad should be
allowed to follow his bent.

So it came about—’twas in that year of the
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the year that saw the
Pompadour come to supreme power (she had
been for three years the king’s acknowledged
mistress)—the youth’s mother, with all a French
mother’s shrewdness and common-sense, gathered
together the sixteen-year-old lad’s sketches, and
bundled off with him in a diligence to Paris.

Arrived in Paris she sought out the greatest
painter of the day, and burst with the shy youth
into the studio of the dandified favourite artist
of the king’s majesty, Pompadour’s Boucher—large-hearted,
generous, much-sinning, world-famed
Boucher, then at the very summit of his
career—he was at that time living in the Rue
Grenelle-Saint-Honoré, which he was about to
leave, and in which Fragonard in his old age
was destined to end his days.

The lad glanced with wonder, we may be
sure, at the great “Rape of Europa” that stood
upon the master’s easel, whilst his mother poured
out in the rough accent of Provence the tale of
the genius of her son—stole, too, a stealthy
scrutiny of the Venus-pieces and Pastorals that[Pg 19]
stood about the studio, and was filled with awed
admiration. The mother besought the genius
of France to make a genius of her son; and
Boucher, with kindly smile upon his lips, glancing
over the immature work of the prodigy, told
the lad that he might come back to him in six
months’ time, pointing out to him, with all that
large-hearted friendliness and sympathy that
made him the loved idol of the art-students, that
he lacked sufficient dexterity in the use of his tools
to enter his studio or to benefit by apprenticeship
to him, and advising the anxious mother to take
him to Chardin as the supreme master in France
from whom to learn the mastery of his craft.

To Chardin the youth went; and France’s
consummate master in the painting of still-life,
putting the palette on the youngster’s thumb
straightway, from the very first day—as his
custom was—and making him use sienna upon
it as his only pigment, advising him as he went,
set him to the copying of the prints from the
masterpieces of his own time, insisting on his
painting large and broad and solid and true.

Young Fragonard made so little progress
that Chardin wrote to his parents that he could
get nothing out of him; and sent the lad, bag
and baggage, out of his studio.[Pg 20]

Thrown upon his own resources, the young
fellow haunted the churches of Paris, brooded
over the masterpieces that hung therein, fixed
them in his mind’s eye, and, returning to his
lodging, painted them, day by day, from memory.

At the end of six months he called again
upon Boucher, his sketches under his arm; and
this time he was not sent away. Astounded at
the youth’s progress, struck by his enthusiasm,
Boucher took him into his studio, and set him
to work to prepare the large decorative cartoons
that artists had to make from their paintings for
use at the Gobelins and Beauvais looms. The
artist painted his picture “in little”; he was also
required to paint an “enlargement” of the size
that the weavers had to make into tapestry—this
enlargement was mostly done by pupils, the
State demanding, however, that the artist should
work over it sufficiently to sign his name upon
it—the head of the factory keeping custody of
the “painting in little” to guide him; the
weavers working from the enlargement. This
work upon the enlargement of Boucher’s paintings
was an ideal training for Fragonard.

The Director-General of Buildings to the king
(or, as we should nowadays call him, Minister
of Fine Arts), Lenormant de Tournehem,[Pg 21]
kinsman to the Pompadour, died suddenly in
the November of 1751; the Pompadour promptly
caused to be appointed in his place her
brother Abel Poisson de Vandières—a shy, handsome
youth, a gentleman, a man of honour,
who brought to his office an exquisite taste, a
loyal nature, and marked abilities. The king,
who liked him well, and called him “little
brother,” soon afterwards created him Marquis
de Marigny—and Fragonard, like many another
artist of his day, was to be beholden to him.

After a couple of years’ training under Boucher,
Fragonard’s master, with that keen interest that
he ever took in the efforts and welfare of youth,
and particularly of his own pupils, urged the
young fellow to compete for the Prix de Rome,
pointing out to him the advantages of winning
it. At twenty, without preparation, and without
being a pupil of the Academy, Fragonard won
the coveted prize with his “Jeroboam Sacrificing
to Idols.” It was in this year that Boucher
was given a studio and apartments at the Louvre.

For three years thereafter, Fragonard was
in the king’s school of six élèves protégés
under Carle Van Loo. He continued to work
in Boucher’s studio, as well as painting on
his own account; and it is to these years that[Pg 22]
belong his “Blind Man’s Buff” and several pictures
in this style.

Meanwhile the quarrels between priests and
parliaments had grown very bitter. The king
took first one side, then the other. It was in
1756, Louis having got foul of his Parliament,
that the unfortunate and foolish Damiens stabbed
the king with a penknife slightly under the fifth
rib of his left side, as he was stepping into his
carriage at Versailles, and suffered by consequence
the terrible tortures and horrible death
that were meted out to such as attempted the
part of regicide.

This was the year when, at twenty-four,
Fragonard was entitled to go to Rome at
the king’s expense—the Italian tour being a
necessary part of an artist’s training who desired
to reach to academic distinction, and honours
in his calling. He started on his journey to Italy
with Boucher’s now famous farewell advice
ringing in his ears: “My dear Frago, you go
into Italy to see the works of Raphael and
Michael Angelo; but—I tell you in confidence,
as a friend—if you take those fellows seriously
you are lost.” (“Lost” was not the exact
phrase, Boucher being a Rabelaisian wag, but
it will pass.)[Pg 23]

[Pg 25]

Arrived in Rome, Fragonard, like his master
before him, was torn with doubts and uncertainties
and warring influences. For several
months he did no work, or little work; and
though he stood before the masterpieces of
Michael Angelo and Raphael, stirred by the
grandeur of their design, and eager to be busy
with his brush, he was too much of a Frenchman,
too much in sympathy with the French
genius, too much enamoured of the art of his
master, to be affected creatively by them. His
hesitations saved him, and won France a master
in her long roll of fame. He escaped the taint
of learning to see through the eyes of others,
evaded the swamping of his own genius in an
endeavour to utter his art in halting Italian.
Rome was not his grave, as it has been the
grave of so many promising young sons of
France; and he came out of the danger a strong
and healthy man. Tiepolo brought him back
vision and inspiration, and the solid earth of
his own age to walk upon. And the French
utterance of his master Boucher called back his
dazed wits to the accents of France. At last the
genius that was in him quickened and strove to
utter itself.

The bright colours of Italy, the glamour of[Pg 26]
her landscapes, these were the living lessons
that bit deeper into his art than all the works of
her antique masters; and the effort to set them
upon his canvas gave to his hand’s skill an
ordered grace and dignity that were of more
vital effect upon his achievement than the paintings
of the great dead.

So it came about that Natoire, then director
of the royal school in the Villa Mancini, having
written his distress to Marigny at the young
fellow’s beginnings, was soon writing enthusiastically
about him, and procured a lengthening
of his stay in Rome.

Here began that lifelong friendship with
Hubert Robert, already making his mark as an
artist, and with the Abbé de Saint-Non, a
charming character, who was to engrave the
work of the two young painters, and greatly
spread their names abroad thereby. Saint-Non’s
influential relations procured him free residence
in the Villa d’Este, where the other two joined
him, and a delightful good-fellowship between
the three men followed—the Abbé’s artistic tastes
adding to the bond of comradeship. So two
years passed pleasantly along at the Villa d’Este,
one of the most beautiful places in all Italy—the
ancient ruins hard by, and the running waters[Pg 27]
and majestic trees leaving an impression upon
Fragonard’s imagination, which passed to his
canvases, and never left his art—developing a
profound sense of style, and a knowledge of light
and air that bathed the scenes he was to paint
with such rare skill and insight. Here grew
that love of stately gardens which are the
essence of his landscapes, and which won to the
heart of a child of Provence.

In distant Paris the making of history was
growing apace. Gossip of it reached to Italy.
A backstairs intrigue almost dislodged the
Pompadour from power. D’Argenson and the
queen’s party threw the beautiful and youthful
Madame de Choiseul-Romanet, not wholly unflattered
at the adventure, into the king’s way to
lure him from the favourite. The king wrote
her a letter of invitation. The girl consulted her
noble kinsman, the Comte de Stainville, of the
Maurepas faction or queen’s party, a bitter
enemy to the Pompadour. De Stainville, his
pride of race wounded that a kinswoman of his
should be offered to the king, went to the
Pompadour, exposed the plot, and forthwith
became her ally—soon her guide in affairs of State.

In the midst of disasters by sea and land the
Pompadour persuaded the king to send for De[Pg 28]
Stainville, and to make him his Prime Minister.
He was created Duc de Choiseul in December
1758. He had as ally one of the most astute and
subtle and daring minds in eighteenth-century
France—his sister Beatrice, the famous Duchesse
de Grammont. The king found a born leader
of men. Choiseul brought back dignity to the
throne. He came near to saving France. Choiseul
was the public opinion of the nation. He
founded his strength on Parliament and on the
new philosophy. He became a national hero.
He could do no wrong. He rose to power in
1758; and at once stemmed the tide of disaster
to France.

The Parliament men took courage. Philosophy,
with one of its men in power, spoke out
with no uncertain voice. All France was
listening.

Fragonard had at last to turn his face homewards;
and dawdling through Italy with Saint-Non,
staying his feet at Bologna and Venice
awhile, the two friends worked slowly towards
Paris, Fragonard entering his beloved city, after
five wander-years, in the autumn of 1761, in his
twenty-ninth year, untainted and unspoiled by
academic training, his art founded upon that of
Boucher, enhanced by his keen study of nature.[Pg 29]
He reached Paris, rich in plans for pictures,
filled with ardour and enthusiasm for his art,
ambitious to create masterpieces, and burning
to distinguish himself.

III

THE DU BARRY

When Fragonard came back to Paris on the
edge of his thirtieth year it was to find that a
great change had come over his master Boucher.
The old, light-hearted, genial painter was showing
signs of the burning of the candle of life
at both ends. His art also was being bitterly
assailed by the new critics—the new philosophy
was asking for ennobling sentiments from the
painted canvas, and the teaching of a moral
lesson from all the arts. Boucher stood frankly
bewildered, blinking questioning eyes at the
frantic din. Old age had come upon him,
creeping over the shrewd kindly features, dulling
the exquisite sight. He could not wholly ignore
the change that was taking place in public taste.
The ideas of the philosophers were penetrating
public opinion. The man of feeling had arisen
and walked in the land. They were beginning
to speak of the great antique days of Greece[Pg 30]
and Rome. Fickle fashion was about to turn
her back upon Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses
and leafy groves, and to take up her
abode awhile with heroes and amongst picturesque
ruins.

Arrived in Paris, Fragonard at once set himself
to the task of painting the historic or
mythologic Academy-piece expected from the
holder of the Prix de Rome on return from the
Italian tour. He painted “The High Priest
Coresus slaying himself to save Callirhoë,”
which, though badly hung at the Salon, and
still to be seen at the Louvre, was hailed with
high praise by the academicians and critics.
The only adverse criticisms of coldness and
timidity levelled against it sound strange in the
light of his after-career, which, whatever its
weaknesses, was not exactly marked with coldness
nor eke with timidity.

For two years thereafter he essayed the
academic style.

But the praises of Diderot and Grimm failed
to fill his pockets; and he decided to paint no
more academic pieces for the critics’ praise.
He had indeed no taste for such things, no
sympathy with ancient thought nor with the
dead past. He was, like his master, a very son[Pg 31]
of France—a child of his own age, glorying in
the love of life and the beauty of his native land.

Having done his duty by his school, he turned
his back upon it gleefully, as Boucher had also
done before him, and set himself joyously to the
painting of the life about him.

His great chance soon came, and in strange
guise.

It so happened that a young blood at the
court, one Baron de Saint-Julien, went to the
painter Doyen with his flame, and asked him to
paint a picture of the pretty creature being swung
by a bishop whilst he himself watched the display
of pretty ankles as the girl went flying through
the air. Doyen had scruples; but recommended
Fragonard for the naughty business.

Fragonard seized the idea readily enough,
except that he made the frail girl’s husband
swing the beauty for her lover’s eyes, using the
incident, as usual, but as the trivial theme for
a splendid setting amidst trees, glorying in the
painting of the foliage—as you may see, if
you step into the Wallace galleries, where is
the exquisite thing that brought Fragonard
fame—the world-famous “Les hazards heureux
de l’Escarpolette.”

The effect was prodigious. De Launay[Pg 32]’s
brilliant engraving of it popularised it throughout
the land. Nobles and rich financiers, and
all the gay world of fashion besides, now strove
to possess canvases signed by Fragonard.
Boucher was grown old and ailing; and just as
Boucher had been the painter of the France of
fashion under the Pompadour, so Fragonard was
now to become the mirror of the court, of the
theatre, of the drawing-room, of the boudoir, of
the age of Du Barry.

Finding a ready market for subjects of
gallantry, he gave rein to his natural bent, and
straightway leaped into the vogue. Pictures
were the hobby of the nobility and the rich;
and France under the Pompadour, and particularly
at this the end of her reign, was madly
spendthrift upon its hobbies and fickle fancies.
The pretty house, delicately tinted rooms, fine
furniture, dainty decorations, and charming
pictures, were a necessity for such as would be
in the fashion.

You shall look in vain for the affected innocence,
the naïve mawkishness, the chaste sentimentality
of Greuze in the master-work of
Fragonard. He knew nothing of these things—cared
less. His was an ardent brush; and he
used it ardently; but always you shall find him
[Pg 35]
using his subject, however naughty, as the mere
excuse for a glorious picture of trees. He is one
of the great landscape-painters of France.

He had many qualities that go to make a
decorative painter. Indeed, it is to the Frenchmen
of the seventeen-hundreds to whom we
may safely go for pictures that make the walls
of a drawing-room a delight. Unlike the Italians,
they are pleasing to live with. His painting of
“La Fête de St. Cloud,” in the dining-room
of the Governor of the Bank of France, is one of
the decorative landscapes of the world.

He was now producing works in considerable
numbers—it is his first, his detailed period, somewhat
severe in arrangement and style as to
composition and handling—the years of “Love
the Conqueror,” the “Bolt,” the “Fountain of
Love,” of “Le Serment d’Amour,” the “Gimblette,”
“Les Baigneuses,” the “Sleeping Bacchante,”
the “Début du modèle,” and the like.

His master, Boucher, was grown old; he could
not carry out the commissions for the decoration
of rooms and for paintings with which he was
overwhelmed; and it was in order to help forward
his brilliant pupil, his “Frago,” that he now
introduced him to his old friend and patron the
farmer-general Bergeret de Grandcour—a man[Pg 36]
of great wealth, a lover of art, and an honorary
member of the Royal Academy—who became
one of Fragonard’s most lavish patrons and
most intimate friends. Bergeret de Grandcour
commissioned several panels in this, Fragonard’s
thirty-fifth year—the year of his painting the
superb “Fête de St. Cloud.” This is towards
the end of that period of minute and detailed
painting which he did with such consummate
skill, yet without bringing pettiness into his
largeness of conception.

Meantime, Choiseul’s masterly mind, having
secured peace abroad, saw that France, if she
were to keep her sovereign State, must be first
cleansed from the dangers that threatened from
within. He turned to the blotting out of the
turbulent order of the Jesuits, whose vindictive
acts against, and quarrels with, the Parliaments,
and whose galling and oppressive tyranny, had
roused the bitter hatred of the magistracy and
of the people throughout the land. Choiseul
they treated as their bitterest enemy. He decided
to blot them out, root and branch, from France.
The popular party closed up its ranks. Choiseul
had not long to wait. The chance came in odd
fashion enough. An attempt by the Order to
end the Pompadour’s scandalous relations with[Pg 37]
the king was the quaint thing—the match that
started the explosion. With all his skill of state-craft,
Choiseul leaped to the weapon. In secret
concert with the king’s powerful favourite he
struck at them through the bankruptcy of their
banking concerns in the West Indies, caused by
their losses in the wars with England; and Louis
abolished the society out of the land, secularising
its members, and seizing its property.

The Pompadour lived but a short while to
enjoy her triumph. Worn-out by her vast activities,
and assailed by debt, she fell ill of a cough
that racked her shrunken body. She died, transacting
the king’s business and affairs of State, on
the 15th of April 1764, in her forty-second year.

Whatever may be said of this cold-blooded,
calculating, grasping woman, who crushed down
every nice instinct of womanhood to win a king’s
favour, who knew no scruple, who was without
mercy, without pardon or forgiveness, without
remorse; bitter and adamant in revenge; who
turned a deaf ear to the cries from the Bastille;
whose heart knew no love but for self; it must
be allowed that at least for Art she did great and
splendid service. She not only encouraged and
brought out the best achievement of her age;
she did Art an even more handsome benefit. She[Pg 38]
insisted on artists painting their age and not
aping the dead past.

To Fragonard personally she rendered no
particular service. His real achievement began
on the eve of her death, when she was a worn-out
and broken woman. Nor had Fragonard
ever that close touch with the royal house or its
favourites during any part of his lifetime that
meant so much to the fortunes of his master,
Boucher.

There were two patrons for whom Fragonard
was about to create a series of masterpieces in
the decoration of their splendid and luxurious
homes—works of Art which were to have
strange adventures and histories. They were
both women.

For the prodigal and eccentric dancer, the
notorious Mademoiselle Guimard, he undertook
the painting of a series of panels. The Guimard
was the rage of Paris—she of the orgic suppers
and the naughty dances with her comrade Vestris.
Frago, who is said to have been more than a
friend of the reckless one of the nimble feet,
undertook the decoration of her house in the
Chaussée d’Antin, known to the bloods as the
Temple of Terpsichore. He painted for the same
room a portrait of the frail beauty as an
[Pg 41]
opera-shepherdess—the simple pastoral life was the pose
of this unsimple age. He was engaged upon
the business, off and on, for several years; and
the many delays at last fretted the light one.
Fragonard, anything but energetic, liked always
to take his own time at his work. The Guimard
got to pestering him—she had a sharp tongue—and
at last, one fine day, upbraided him roundly,
taunting him with a sneer that he would never
get the work finished. Fragonard lost patience
and temper, goaded by her ill-manners, her abuse,
and her biting tongue. “It is finished,” said he;
and walked out of the house. The Guimard could
never get him back; but one day he slipped in
alone, painted the set dancer’s-smile from the
dancer’s mouth, and placed there instead a snarl
upon her lips.

Before this breach between them Fragonard
had painted several portraits of the Guimard.

However, the work for the lady was to have
far-reaching results little dreamed of. For the
completion of the room, Fragonard procured the
commission for David, then twenty-five; and
David never forgot the service rendered. He was
to repay it tenfold when black days threatened;
and with rare courage, when even the courage
of gratitude was a deadly dangerous commodity.[Pg 42]

However, this was not as yet; the sun shone
in the skies; and all was gaiety and laughter
still.

The “Chiffre d’Amour,” the picture of a pretty
girl who cuts her lover’s monogram in the bark
of a tree’s trunk, the shadowed tree and figure
telling darkly against the glamorous half light
beyond, was one of Fragonard’s happiest inspirations
of these years, as any one may see who
steps into the Wallace galleries. Here also
may be seen to-day the exquisite “Fair-haired
Boy.” The boldly painted “L’Heure de Berger”
was wet upon the canvas about this year, though
its boldness of handling foretells his later manner,
whilst the spirit of Boucher is over all.

Four years after the death of the Pompadour
the patient neglected queen, amiable dull Marie
Leczinska, followed her supplanter to the grave.
The king’s grief and contrition and his solemn
vows to mend his ways came somewhat over-late;
they lasted little longer than the drying of
his floods of tears over the body of his dead
consort.

On the Eve of Candlemas, the first day of
February 1769, at a convivial party in Paris that
was not wholly without political significance, a
Jesuit priest raised his glass To the Presenta[Pg 43]tion!
adding after the toast—“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
was well received by the old aristocrats and
young bloods about the table; and they drank
a bumper to the pretty Madame du Barry. For
the Jesuits had no love for the king’s minister
Choiseul—and the madcap girl was but the lure
whereby the king was to be drawn from his
great minister. So religion rallied about the
frail beauty, and hid behind her extravagant
skirts—one of which cost close on £2000—and,
with the old nobility, drank damnation to the
king’s minister and To the devil with the new
thought and with parliaments. Long live the
king and the divine right of kings!

Our worthy priest seems to have had the ear
of destiny, though he dated his certainty near
upon a couple of months too soon.

So it came about that before a 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[Pg 44]
Anne Béqus, 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, when—being reborn under a
forged birth-certificate at the king’s ordering, as
Anne de Vaubernier, and being married by the
same orders to the Count du Barry, an obliging
nobleman of the court—she appeared at Versailles
as the immortally frail Countess du Barry.

The remonstrances of Choiseul with the king
against this new 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, and was to cost him
and his France very dear.

The king’s infatuation brought royalty into
utter contempt amongst the people. It was to
cost France a terrible price—and Fragonard not
least of all.

One of the first gifts from the king to the Du
Barry was the little castle of Louveciennes; and
she proceeded with reckless extravagance to
furnish her handsome home. Drouais, the artist,
sold to her for 1200 livres (double florins), as overdoors
for one of the rooms, four panels that
he had bought from Fragonard. They have[Pg 45]
vanished; but they served Fragonard a good
turn—he received an order to decorate Du
Barry’s luxurious pavilion of Luciennes, which
she had had built to entertain the king at her
“little suppers.”

Thus it chanced that for this wilful light-o’-love
Fragonard painted the great master-work
of his life—the five world-famous canvases of the
series of “The Progress of Love in the Heart of
Maidenhood,” or, as they are better known, “The
Romance of Love and Youth”—the old king
masquerading therein as a young shepherd, and
the Du Barry as a shepherdess. In “The
Ladder” (“L’Escalade” or “Le Rendezvous”)
the Du Barry plays the part of a timid young
girl who starts as she sees her shepherd-lover to
be the king; the “Pursuit” follows; then the
“Souvenirs” and “Love Crowned.” The last of
the five, the discarded mistress in “Deserted,”
was only begun; and was not completed by
Fragonard until twenty years later at Grasse, to
complete the set.

What it was that struck a chill into the frail
Du Barry’s favour, so that the masterpieces of
Fragonard never entered within her doors, is
not fully known. Whatsoever the cause, these
canvases were rejected by her. It is said that[Pg 46]
the work was found to be disappointing, being
lacking as to the indecencies by the Du Barry
and the king, who preferred the more suggestive
panels of Vien. It is true that Fragonard’s
earlier four panels which she possessed were
in questionable taste, and that these five were
pure; indeed, their trivial story matters little
amidst the massy foliage and the majestic trees
that spring into the swinging heavens. Fragonard
suspected, and somewhat resented the
suspicion, that he was being made to paint in a
sort of artistic duel with Vien. At any rate,
Vien was chosen. So it came that the discarded
pictures lay in Fragonard’s studio for over twenty
years, when we shall see them, rolled up, making
a chief part of the strange baggage of Fragonard’s
flight from his beloved Paris.

The fact was that the Du Barry was of the
gutter. She had the crude love of fineries of
the girl promoted from the gutter. She loved
display. But into her home she brought the
vulgar singers of the lowest theatres, 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.

It is part of the irony of life that Fragonard,[Pg 47]
who never entered into the favourite’s friendship,
should have become the recognised artist of her
day. It was a part of that grim irony that
caused the Du Barry, whose age he honours, to
reject the most exquisite work of his hands—in
which his art is seen at its highest achievement,
the tender half-melancholy of the thing stated
with a lyric beauty that displays his genius in
its supreme flight.

A search through the Du Barry’s bills—and
there are four huge bound volumes of them—reveals
the list of pictures painted by Boucher,
by Vien, by Greuze, and by others, for the
spendthrift woman; but of transaction with
Fragonard there is no slightest hint.

IV

MARRIAGE

There lived in Grasse, with its rich harvests
of flowers, and given to the distilling of perfumes
therefrom, a family that had come from Avignon—its
name, Gérard, and on friendly terms with
the Fragonards. It so chanced that a young
woman of the family, the seventeen-year-old
Marie Anne Gérard, was sent to Paris, to the
care of Fragonard, in order to earn her living[Pg 48]
in the shop of a scent-seller, one Isnard. The
girl had artistic leanings, and fell a-painting of
fans and miniatures. She had need of a teacher;
and who better qualified for the business than
her townsman, the famous Fragonard? What
more natural than that Fragonard should become
her master? She was a jovial girl. So they
would talk of home, and the people amongst
whom they had been bred. She was no particular
beauty, as her picture by Fragonard
proves; she had the rough accent of Provence;
was thick-set and clumsy of figure, and of heavy
features, but she had the youth and freshness
and health of a young woman’s teens, that hide
the blemishes and full significance of these
coarsenesses. She and Fragonard fell a-kissing.
Fragonard, now thirty-seven, married Marie
Anne Gérard in her eighteenth year; and she
bore him a much loved daughter, Rosalie—and
ten years later, in 1780, a son, Alexandre Evariste
Fragonard.

There came to live with the newly married
couple his wife’s younger sister Marguerite and
her young brother Henri Gérard, who was
learning engraving.

Fragonard’s marriage at once affected his
habits and his art. The wild oats of his artistic
[Pg 51]
career were near sown. The naughtinesses of
girls of pleasure gave place to the grace and
tenderness of the home-life—the cradle took the
place of the bed of light adventures; and children
blossomed on to his canvases. He set aside the
make-believe shepherds and shepherdesses of
the vogue; and henceforth painted the “real
thing” in rural surroundings.

He brought to his homeliest pictures a beauty
of arrangement, a sense of style, and a dignity
worthy of the most majestic subjects. He came
at this time under the influence of the Dutch
landscapists, and stole from them the solidity
of their massing in foliage, the truth of their
character-drawing, the close observation of their
cattle and animal-life, their cloudy skies, and the
finish and force of their craftsmanship. Whether
he went into Holland is disputed. He was too
keen an artist, his was too original a genius, to
imitate their style or take on their Dutch accent.
He simply took from them such part of their
craftsmanship as could enter into the facile
gracious genius of France without clogging its
grace. He is now content with his house and
garden for scenery, with his family for models.
He realises that an artist has no need to go
abroad to find “paintable things.[Pg 52]”

The “Heureuse Fécondité,” the “Visit to the
Nurse” (the second one), the “Schoolmistress,”
the “Good Mother,” the “Retour au logis,” the
“L’Education fait tout,” the “Dites donc, si’l
vous plaît,” are of this period.

In all he did he proves himself an artist, incapable
of mediocrity, bringing distinction and
style to all that he touches.

Fragonard also excelled in the painting of
miniatures. And there are small portraits under
fancy names to be seen at the Louvre, painted
with a breadth and force that prove him to have
known the work of Franz Hals. The figure of
a man, known as “Figure de Fantaisie” or
“Inspiration,” is stated with a directness and
vividness worthy of the great Dutch master.
Indeed, there is much in the direct handling of
the paint and the life of the thing that recalls
Franz Hals—the very arrangement of the dress
and the treatment of the hand being a careless
attempt to recall the habits and fashions of the
Dutchman. “La Musique” repeats the impression.
And even the more pronouncedly French
style of the pretty woman in “La Chanteuse”
does not disguise the inspiration of Franz Hals in
the painting of the bodice, the cuffs, and the
details—the high ruffle is “dragged in” from[Pg 53]
Hals’s day. The “Music Lesson” at the Louvre
was painted about the same time.

Fragonard’s old master, Boucher, for some
time had been “going about like a shadow of
himself.” The year after Fragonard’s marriage
the old painter was found dead, sitting at his
easel before an unfinished picture of Venus, the
brush fallen out of his fingers—the light of the
“Glory of Paris” gone out.

Boucher died a few months before that
Christmas Eve of 1770 that saw Choiseul driven
from power by the trio of knaves who used the
vulgar but kindly woman Du Barry as their tool—indeed
she refused to pull the great minister
down until she had made handsome terms on
his behalf; Choiseul was too astute a man not
to recognise what lay beyond the shadow of her
pretty skirts—nay, does he not turn in the courtyard
as he leaves the palace to go into banishment,
his lettre de cachet in his pocket, and,
seeing a woman looking out from a window at
the end of an alley, bow and kiss his hand to
the window where gazes out of tear-filled eyes
this strange doomed beauty who has won to the
sceptre of France? ’Twas four years before
the small-pox took the king—four years during
which this same Du Barry, with her precious trio,[Pg 54]
d’Aiguillon, Maupeou, and Terray, sent the
members of Parliament into banishment—years
that launched royal France on its downward
rushing, with laughter and riot, to its doom,
whilst the apathetic Louis shrugged his now
gross royal shoulders at all warnings of catastrophe,
which to give him due credit, he was
scarce witless enough or blind enough not to
foresee. Nay, did he not even admit it in his
constantly affirmed, if cynical, creed that “things,
as they were, would last as long as he; and he
that came after him must shift for himself”?
Ay; he came even nearer to the kernel of the
significance of things, when, shrugging his no
longer well-beloved shoulders, as the Pompadour
had done, he repeated her cynical saying of
“Après nous le déluge.” It was to be a deluge
indeed—scarlet red.

Wit and ruthless fatuity were the order of
the day; these folk were wondrous full of the
neatly turned phrase and the polished epigram.
Most fatuous of them all, and as ruthless as any,
was Terray—he who tinkered with finance, with
crown to his many infamies the scandalous Pacte
de Famille, that mercantile company that was
to produce an artificial rise in the price of corn
by buying up the grain of France, exporting it,[Pg 55]
and bringing it back for sale at vast profit—with
Louis of France as considerable shareholder.
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—he and
his precious privileged class.

Yet Louis of France spake prophecy—if unwitting
of it. The guillotine was not to have
him. In 1774 he was stricken down with the
small-pox, and the sick-room in the palace saw
the Du Barry and her party fight a duel with
Choiseul’s party for his possession—never, surely,
was a more grim, more fantastic warfare than that
bitter intrigue to get the confessor to the king’s
bedside, that meant the dismissal of the favourite
before he should be allowed to receive the
Absolution—in which the strange blasphemy was
enacted of the Eucharist being hustled about the
passages, whilst the bigots strove against its
administration, and the freethinkers demanded
the last consolation of the Church. 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 hurried without pomp,
or circumstance, or pretence of honours to St.
Denis—being rattled thereto at the trot, the[Pg 56]
crowd that lined the way showering epigrams
not wholly friendly upon its 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.

Even the poor weeping Du Barry was gone,
hustled from the palace at the wandering orders
of the dying delirious king. D’Aiguillon also,
and Maupeou and Terray were gone. And the
Court was hailing the new king and his queen—ill-fated
Louis the Sixteenth and tactless Marie
Antoinette.

The scandalous levity of the privileged class
of the day, and its ruthless vindictiveness when
thwarted, had near done their work. A proud
and gallant people touched bottom in humiliation.
The pens of the wits and thinkers sent the new
opinion broadcast amongst a people wholly scandalised
and punished by the corruption of their
governors. These writings made astounding and
alarming way. The “intellectuals” were all on
the side of the people—Montesquieu, Voltaire,
Diderot, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Helvetius, Condillac,
the Abbé Raynal. With wit and sarcasm
and invective and argument, they stirred passions,
appealing to self-respect and dignity and honour
and the innate love of freedom in the strong;[Pg 57]
they appealed to common-sense, to the craving
for liberty in man’s being, to the rights of the
individual; and the printing-press scattered their
wit and wisdom throughout 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 contempt. And they needed to manufacture
no evidence. France had lain supine, a
mighty people as they proved themselves when
their right arms were freed—lain in chains under
the heel of a king who had been capable of
setting their necks under the feet of a trivial
and foolish woman, whose nursery had been
the gutter.

Yet Du Barry, when all her faults are set
against her, suffered undue execration. She had
no grain of ill-will in her nature. During her
reign 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 vengeances, and
kept the Court free from the brutalities that the
Pompadour 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 kin—whom most[Pg 58]
women, thus suddenly raised to the noblesse,
would have avoided like a plague. The
scoundrels who made her their toy were responsible
for every evil deed that she was
accused of committing. And even the new king,
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 at Luciennes. The Du
Barry had striven to abolish the lettre de
cachet; the new king brought it back, 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
reign which was about to begin.

To Fragonard these things were but tattle;
yet the doing of them was to reach to his hearth;
the consequences of them were to strip him bare
and wreck him—he was to see his wife and
womenkind dragging through the streets of
Paris to beg bread and meat at the gates of the
city. But the future was mercifully hidden from
him. He was now at the height of his career;
and was to taste wider success.

Fragonard’s name will always be linked with
that of his friend and patron, a wealthy man, the
[Pg 61]
farmer-general Bergeret de Grandcour. His
family visited at the rich man’s houses in town
and country.

Now the career of a rich man was incomplete
without the making of the Grand Tour. At
the least the gentleman of means must have
roamed through Italy. And it was thus that,
with Bergeret de Grandcour, Fragonard now
made his second journey into Italy in his forty-second
year.

Fragonard was delighted at the prospect of
seeing his loved Italy again after twelve years.
It was a family party—Fragonard and his wife,
with Bergeret de Grandcour and his son, to say
nothing of Bergeret’s servants and cook and
following. It was a happy, merry journeying in
extravagant luxury.

Fragonard had aforetime gone into Italy as
a penniless student and an unknown man; he
now travelled in the grand style as the guest of
a man of affairs, visiting palaces and churches,
received in state by the highest in the land,
dining with the Ambassador of France, having
audience of the Pope, advising Bergeret de
Grandcour in the buying of art-treasures. He
tasted all the delights of great wealth. He went
to a concert “chez le lord Hamilton,” seeing[Pg 62]
and speaking with la belle Emma—Nelson’s
Emma. He stood in Naples; he tramped up
Vesuvius. It was at Naples the news came
that Louis the Fifteenth lay dying of the small-pox—a
few days later the old king died.

The party at once turned their faces homewards,
returning to Paris in leisurely fashion by
way of Venice, Vienna, and Germany, only to
know, at the journey’s ending, one of those
miserable and sordid quarrels that seem to dog
the friendships of men of genius. Going to
Bergeret de Grandcour’s house in Paris to get
his portfolios of sketches, made throughout the
journey, Fragonard found to his amazement and
consternation that Bergeret de Grandcour angrily
refused to give them up, claiming them as payment
for his outlay upon him during the Italian
journey. The sorry business ended in the law-courts,
and in the loss of the lawsuit by
Bergeret de Grandcour, who was condemned to
give up the drawings or to pay a 30,000 livres
fine (£6000). The ugly breach that threatened
to open between them, however, was soon healed
by reconciliation; and Bergeret de Grandcour’s
son became one of Fragonard’s closest and most
intimate friends.

[Pg 63]

V

THE TERROR

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 good intentions,
sincerely anxious for the well-being of his
people; but of a diffident and timid character,
and under the influence of a young consort, the
beautiful Queen Marie Antoinette, of imperious
temper and of light and frivolous manners, who
brought to her counsels a deplorable lack of
judgment.

The Du Barry sent a-packing, and d’Aiguillon
and the rest of their crew, the young king recalled
the crafty old Maurepas who had been
banished by the Pompadour, an ill move—though
the setting of Turgot over the finances augured
well. And when the great minister Turgot fell,
he gave way to as good a man, the worthy honest
banker, Neckar.

In a happy hour Fragonard was granted by
the king the eagerly sought haven of the artists
of his time—a studio and apartments at the old
palace of the Louvre, as his master Boucher
had been granted them before him.[Pg 64]

Settling in with his wife, his girl Rosalie, his
son Alexandre Evariste, and his talented sister-in-law
Marguerite Gérard, he lived thereat a
life almost opulent, making large sums of money,
some eight thousand pounds a year, at this time.
He joyed in decorating his rooms. He was the
life and soul of a group of brilliant men who
gathered about him, having the deepest affection
for him.

His sister-in-law, Marguerite Gérard, was as
gay and distinguished in manners, and as beautiful,
as his jovial wife was dull and vulgar and
coarse—the vile accent of Grasse, that made his
wife’s speech horrible to the ear, becoming
slurred into a shadow of itself on Marguerite’s
tongue, and turned by the enchanting accents
of the younger sister’s lips into seduction. This
girl’s friendship and companionship became an
ever-increasing delight to the aging painter.
Their correspondence, when apart, was passionately
affectionate. Ugly scandals got abroad—scandals
difficult to prove or disprove. The man
and woman were of like tastes, of like temperaments;
it was, likely enough, little more than
that. The girl was of a somewhat cold nature;
and we must read her last letters as censoriously
as her first—when, in reply to Fragonard, evil[Pg 65]
days having fallen upon him, and being old and
next to ruined, on his asking her for money to
help him, she, who owed everything to him, refused
him with the trite sermon: “to practise
economy, to be reasonable, and to remember that
in brooding over fancies one only increases them
without being any the happier.” But this was
not as yet.

Fragonard, happy in his home at the Louvre,
free from cares, content amongst devoted friends,
reached his fifty-fifth year when he had suddenly
to gaze horrified at the first ugly hint that, in
the years to come, he must expect to hear the
scythe of the Great Reaper—know the passing
of friends and loved ones. He was to reel under
the first serious blow of his life. His bright,
witty, winsome girl Rosalie died in her eighteenth
year. It nearly killed him.

But there was a blacker, a vaster shadow
came looming over the land—a threat that boded
ill for such as took life too airily.

In an unfortunate moment for the royal house,
and against the will of the king and of Neckar,
the nation went mad with enthusiasm over
England’s revolted American colonies; and the
alliance was formed that France swore not to
sever until America was declared independent.[Pg 66]
It started the war with England. The successes
of the revolted colonies made the coming of the
Revolution in France a certainty. The fall of
Neckar and the rise of the new minister, Calonne,
sent France rushing to the brink. The distress
of the people became unbearable. The royal
family and the Court sank in the people’s respect,
and the people were no longer the people of the
decade before—they had watched the Revolution
in America, and they had seen the Revolution
victorious. The fall of Calonne only led to
the rise of the turbulent and stupid Cardinal de
Brienne; and the Court was completely foul of
the people when De Brienne threw up office in
a panic and fled across the frontier, leaving the
Government in utter confusion.

The king recalled Neckar. The calling of the
States-General 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 over 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 Grève—and
à la lanterne! became the cry of fashion.[Pg 67]

Fragonard was in his fifty-seventh year when
he heard in his lodging at the Louvre the thunderclap
of this 14th of July 1789—saw the dawn of
the Revolution.

The rose of the dawn was soon to turn to
blood-red crimson. The storm had been muttering
and growling its curses for years before the
death of Louis the Fifteenth. It came up in
threatening blackness darkly behind the dawn,
and was soon to break with a roar upon reckless
Paris. It came responsive to the rattle of musketry
in the far West, hard by Boston harbour.

Fragonard and his friends were of the independents—they
were liberals whom love of elegance
had not prevented from sympathising with
the sufferings of the people, and who had thrilled
with the new thought. Fragonard’s intelligence
drew him naturally towards the new ideas; indeed
he owed little to the Court; and when France
was threatened by the coalition of Europe against
her, he, with Gérard, David, and others, went on
the 7th of September with the artist’s womenfolk
to give up their jewelry to the National Assembly.

But the storm burst, and soon affairs became
tragic red.

There came, for the ruin of the cause of a
constitutional monarchy and to end the last hope[Pg 68]
of the Court party, the unfortunate death of
Mirabeau—the hesitations of the king—his foolish
flight to Varennes—his arrest.

The constitutional party in the Legislative
Assembly, at first dominant, became subordinate
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 proscription of all emigrants quickly followed.
It was as unsafe to leave as to stay in Paris.
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 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, decreed in their place
citoyen and citoyenne, and the use of tu and
toi for vous.

The National Convention also displayed the
antagonism of the two wings of the now all-powerful
Girondist party—the Girondists and
[Pg 71]
the Jacobins or Montagnards. The conflict
began with the 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 between the Girondists and
Jacobins for supreme power. The 27th of May
1793 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 of the hellish business.
The scaffolds reeked with blood—from that of
Marie Antoinette and Egalité Orleans to that
of the Girondist deputies and Madame Roland,
and the most insignificant beggar 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 notice of a theft from her house. It
drew all eyes to her wealth. And she went to
the guillotine shrieking with terror and betraying
all who had protected her. Then came strife[Pg 72]
amongst the Jacobins. Robespierre and Danton
fought the scoundrel Hébert 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,
Eglantine and their humane fellows, were sent
to the guillotine. Between the 10th of June
and the 27th of July, in 1794, fourteen hundred
people in Paris alone died on the scaffold.

Fragonard dreaded to fly from the tempest.
It was as safe to remain in Paris as to leave the
city. Any day he might be taken. Sadness fell
upon him and ate into his heart. The old artist
could not look without uneasiness upon the ruin
of the aristocracy, of the farmers-general, and of
the gentle class, now in exile or prison or under
trial—his means of livelihood utterly gone.
Without hate for Royalty or for the Republic,
the artists, by birth plebeian and in manners
bourgeois, many of them old men, could but
blink with fearful eyes at the vast upheaval.
Their art was completely put out of fashion—a
new art, solemn and severe, classical and heroic,
was born. For half a century the charming art
of France of the eighteenth century lay wholly[Pg 73]
buried—a thing of contempt wherever it showed
above the ashes.

Fragonard’s powerful young friend David, the
painter, now stood sternly watchful over the old
man’s welfare; and David was at the height of
his popularity—he was a member of the Convention.
He took every opportunity to show his
friendship publicly, visited Fragonard regularly,
secured him his lodgings at the Louvre, brought
about his election to the jury of the Arts created
by the Convention to take the place of the Royal
Academy.

But the old artist was bewildered.

The national enthusiasm was not in him.
The artists were ruined by the destruction of
their pensions. The buyers of Fragonard’s
pictures were dispersed, their power and their
money gone, their favour dissipated. Fragonard
worked on without conviction or truth. The
new school uprooted all his settled ideals. He
struggled hard to catch the new ideas, and
failed. He helped to plant a tree of liberty in
the court of the Louvre, meditating the while
how he could be gone from Paris—it was a tragic
farce, played with his soul. The glories of the
Revolution alarmed the old man. He saw the
kinsfolk of his friends dragged off to the guillo[Pg 74]tine.
He had guarded against suspicion and
arrest by giving a certificate early in 1794, the
year of the Terror, stating that he had no intention
of emigrating, adding a statement of residence,
and avowing his citizenship. He felt that
even these acts were not enough protection in
these terrible years. 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 the guillotine. Friends were taken
in the night. Hubert Robert was seized and
flung into Saint Lazare, escaping death but by
an accident. The state of misery and want
amongst the artists and their wives and families
at this time was pitiable.

Fragonard gladly snatched at the invitation
of an old friend of his family, Monsieur Maubert,
to go to him at Grasse during these anxious
times of the travail that had come upon France.

Shortly after that Sunday in December when
the Du Barry went shrieking to her hideous
death at the guillotine, Fragonard, turning his
face to the South of his birth, was rolling up
amongst his baggage the four finished canvases
of “The Romance of Love and Youth,” and the
unfinished fifth canvas, “Deserted,” ordered and
repudiated by the Du Barry. He bundled his[Pg 75]
family into a chaise, and lumbered out of Paris,
rumbling on clattering wheels through the guards
at the gates, and making southwards towards
Provence for his friend’s house at Grasse. Here,
far away from the din and strife, Fragonard set
up his world-famous decorative panels in the
salon of his host, which they admirably fitted,
painting for the overdoors, “Love the Conqueror,”
“Love-folly,” “Love pursuing a Dove,” “Love
embracing the Universe,” and a panel over the
fireplace, “Triumph of Love.” He also painted
during his stay the portraits of the brothers
Maubert; and, to keep his host safe from ugly
rumours and unfriendly eyes, he decorated the
vestibule with revolutionary emblems, phrygian
bonnet, axes and faggots, and the masks of
Robespierre and the Abbé Gregoire, and the like
trickings of red republicanism…. His host
was the maternal grandfather of the Malvilan,
at whose death in 1903, the room and its decorations
were sold to an American collector
for a huge sum of money.

Meanwhile, 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.[Pg 76]

All this time the armies of France were winning
the respect of the world by their gallantry
and skill. The 23rd of September 1795, saw
France establish the Directory—the 5th of
October, the Day of the Sections, saw the stiff
fight about the Church of St. Roch, and Napoleon
Bonaparte appointed second-in-command of the
army. The young general was soon Commander-in-Chief.
And France thenceforth advanced,
spite of the many blunders of the Directory,
with all the genius of her race, to the splendid
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 of
Brumaire (9th and 10th of November 1799) destroyed
the Directory and set the people’s idol,
Napoleon Bonaparte, at the helm of her mighty
state.

VI

THE END

To Paris Fragonard crept back, he and his
family, to his old quarters at the Louvre, when
Napoleon was come to power, and the guillotine
was slaked with blood. He returned to Paris a
poor old man.[Pg 77]

The enthusiasm was gone out of his invention,
the volition out of his hand’s cunning, the breath
out of his career. He was out of the fashion; a
man risen from the dead. His efforts to catch
the spirit of the time were pathetic. He painted
rarely now. He won a passing success with an
historic canvas or so, done in the new manner.
But what did Fragonard know of political allegories?
what enthusiasm had he for the famous
days of the Revolution? what were caricature or
satire to him, any more than the heroic splendour
of Greece and Rome? The gods of elegance were
dead; a severe and frigid morality stood upon
their altars.

We have a pen-picture of the old painter at
this time—short, big of head, stout, full-bodied,
brisk, alert, ever gay; he has red cheeks, sparkling
eyes, grey hair very much frizzed out; he is
to be seen wandering about the Louvre dressed
in a cloak or overcoat of a mixed grey cloth,
without hooks or eyes or buttons—a cloak which
the old man, when he is at work, ties at the waist
with it does not matter what—a piece of string,
a crumpled chiffon. Every one loves “little father
Fragonard.” Through every shock of good and
evil fortune he remains alert and cheerful. The
old face smiles even through tears.[Pg 78]

Thus, walking with aging step towards the
end, he saw Napoleon created Emperor of the
French, his triumphant career marred only at rare
intervals by such disasters as Trafalgar—heard
perhaps of the suicide of the unfortunate but
gallant Villeneuve at the disgrace of trial by
court-martial for this very loss of Trafalgar.

In the year of 1806, on the New Year’s Day of
which were abolished the Republican reckonings
of the years as established at the Revolution,
suddenly came the suppression of the artists’
lodging at the Louvre by decree of the Emperor.
The Fragonards went to live hard by in the house
of the restaurant-keeper Very, in the Rue Grenelle
Saint-Honoré. The move was for Fragonard
but the prelude to a longer journey.

The old artist walks now more sluggishly than
of old, his four-and-seventy years have taken the
briskness out of his step. Returning from the
Champ de Mars on a sultry day in August he
becomes heated—enters a café to eat an ice;
congestion of the brain sets in. At five of the
clock in the morning of the 22nd day of August
1806, Fragonard enters into the eternal sleep—at
the hour that his master Boucher had gone
to sleep.

Thus passed away the last of the great[Pg 79]
painters of France’s gaiety and lightness of
heart.

Madame Fragonard lived to be seventy-seven,
dying in 1824. Marguerite Gérard had a happy
career as an artist under the Empire and the
Restoration, but never married—dying at seventy-six,
loaded with honours and in comfortable
circumstances in the year that Queen Victoria
came to the throne of England. Thus peacefully
ended the days of Fragonard and his immediate
kin after the turmoil and fierce tragic years of
the Terror.

Painting with prodigal hand a series of elegant
masterpieces in a century that made elegance its
god, Fragonard disappeared, neglected and well-nigh
discredited for years, with Watteau and
Boucher and Greuze for goodly company; but
with them, he is come into his own again, lord of
a very realm of beauty.

To understand the atmosphere of the France
of the seventeen-hundreds before the Revolution
it is necessary to understand the art of Watteau,
of Boucher, of Fragonard, and of Chardin. Of its
pictured romance, Watteau and Boucher and
Fragonard hold the keys. To shut the book of
these is to be blind to the revelation of the greater
part of that romance. Watteau states the new[Pg 80]
France of light airs and gaiety and pleasant
prospects, tinged with sweet melancholy, that
became the dream of a France rid of the pomposity
and mock-heroics of the Grand Monarque;
Boucher fulfils the century; Fragonard utters its
swan’s note. The art of Fragonard embodies
astoundingly the pulsing evening of a century
of the life of France, uttering its gay blithe note,
skimming over the dangerous deeps of its mighty
significance, yet not wholly disregarding the
deeps as did the art of his two great forerunners.
His is the last word of that mock-heroic France
that Louis the Fourteenth built on stately and
pompous pretence; that Louis the Fifteenth
still further corrupted by the worship of mere
elegance; that Louis the Sixteenth sent to its
grave—a suffering people out of which a real
France arose, from mighty and awful travail, like
a giant, and stood bestriding the world, a superb
reality.

The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh