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 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; 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 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.
[Illustration: PLATE VII.--THE FAIR-HAIRED BOY
(In the Wallace Collection)
To the visitor to the Wallace collection the picture by Fragonard next
best known after the "Chiffre d'Amour" and the "Swing," is this
exquisite study of a fair-haired boy--the child is painted with a
subtle grace and consummate delicacy rarely combined with the
directness and impressionism here displayed by Fragonard.]
Fragonard's name will always be linked with that of his friend and
patron, a wealthy man, the 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 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.
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.
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 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. 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.
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 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_.
[Illustration: PLATE VIII.--LE BILLET DOUX
(In the Collection of M. Wildenstein, Paris)
Here we see Fragonard in his phase of sentimental recorder of
love-scenes so typical of the art of Louis the Fifteenth's day.]
The National Convention also displayed the antagonism of the two wings
of the now all-powerful Girondist party--the Girondists and 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 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
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 guillotine. 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.