RUIN AND DEATH
Even during these brilliant days, when Greuze was considered the most
fortunate of mortals, there lurked beneath the glittering surface of
his life a grim reality which made happiness impossible, the misery of
a private life dominated by as bad a wife as ever cursed a man’s
existence.
She was a Mademoiselle Babuty, daughter of a bookseller on the Quai
des Augustins, and entering the little shop to buy some books, Greuze
became infatuated with her beauty. “White and slender as a lily, red
as a rose,” is how Diderot describes her, and though she was past
thirty when Greuze made her acquaintance, she must have been a
remarkably pretty woman, with a round, smooth forehead, eyes full of
_naïveté_ beneath long shadowing lashes, small nose, moist lips,
delicate complexion. A sentimental, coquettish air redeemed what would
otherwise have been an inane expression. In the portraits under her
own name, and several pictures for which she posed, such as “La Mère
Bien-aimée” and “La Philosophie endormie,” you see that if she was not
the actual model, she was certainly the ideal that inspired most of
Greuze’s best work.
At first he had no intention of marrying her, and they had known each
other two or three years before she practically compelled him to do so
by threatening to kill herself if he did not make her his wife. It was
a disastrous marriage. Lazy, greedy, extravagant, devoid of all moral
sense, she soon got over the satisfaction the position of her husband
gave her, and began to regard his work merely as a means to supply her
caprices. When she had been married a few years she sent her two
little girls away to school, and going from bad to worse, ended by
filling the house with vulgar men, who made Greuze ridiculous. Her
business training fitted her to keep the monetary accounts of the
family, and when at length her husband was obliged to look into them
to try to account for the disappearance of vast sums of money, he
found she had been squandering them on her dissolute friends. The
extent of her audacity can be judged by her accounting for the
disappearance of 100,000 livres by saying she had invested it in a
ship which had gone down at sea, and she refused to give the name of
the vessel or captain.
Of all that freedom of mind and internal peace so important to all
successful work, but supremely so to the artist whose creations are to
be strong, Greuze knew nothing. Petty discussions, foolish quarrels,
then grievous wrongs and personal violences, made up the background of
his life, and it is astonishing that the trials of man and husband
did not sap the strength of the artist. You would wonder why he
supported it all so long did you not know that the artistic
temperament finds the most important part of its life in its work, and
falls an easy prey to imposition in most things outside it. Besides,
at first he loved her very sincerely, and she was the mother of his
two daughters. At length, when cartoons were printed ridiculing her
lightness, and her husband for supporting it, and her behaviour was
instrumental in his having to resign his _logement_ in the Louvre,
even Greuze’s patience gave way, and in 1785 a deed of separation
enabled him to get rid of her.
Considering the large sums commanded by his pictures--and it was said
he painted one a day--and the vast sale of the engravings, it is
unlikely, even with a vicious wife’s extravagance, Greuze could ever
have known want in the ordinary course of events. But the terrible
days of the Revolution were at hand. Bank after bank failed, and
slowly but surely all his savings had vanished. With the fall of the
monarchy, the annual pension of 1500 livres granted by the King for
thirty-seven years of work in “an art he had exercised with success”
went, and finally he was reduced to what he was producing as a means
of living. But, alas, when from chaos anything like order arose, and
Greuze, now grown old, sent to the Salon of the year VIII. seventeen
works of the kind that had earned for him so much glory in the past,
the new order of things knew him not. The risen David was the god of
the moment, and at each new picture of his a little more scorn fell on
those who had preceded him.
It was in vain that he wrote to the papers, calling attention, as of
old, to the moral meaning of his work; in vain that he tried to fall
in with new ideas and paint classical scenes like his “Ariadne at
Naxos.” Any notice he received was worse than none, and two years
before he died he was cruelly summed up by a critic who wrote: “Greuze
is an old man inspired by Boucher, whom he followed. His colour is not
true, his drawing poor.” We hear of his receiving 175 francs for a
picture that would formerly have brought him thousands of livres; we
hear of his wearing shabby frayed clothes he could not afford to
replace. Finally, there are pitiful letters, one asking for an advance
on a picture ordered out of charity, another saying, “I am
seventy-five years old, and have not a single order for a picture. I
have nothing left but my talent and my courage.”
In these days of bitter neglect and dire poverty Greuze’s pride stood
him in good stead. He seems to have worried more at the prospect of
leaving his daughters unprovided for than because of his own
privations, and till the last he kept the indomitable spirit that
characterised him. “Who is king to-day?” he would ask sarcastically,
as he lay in bed waiting for the end.
“I am ready for the journey,” he said to his friend Barthélemy, just
before he died. “Good-bye. I shall expect you at my funeral. You will
be all alone there, like the poor man’s dog.”
Worn out as much by the heavy weight of a dead reputation as by the
years his robust country constitution enabled him to carry so lightly,
he died on March 21, 1805. The humble funeral, followed by two
persons, would have been tragic in its friendlessness but for the
message of hope written on a wreath of Immortelles placed on his
coffin by a weeping woman closely veiled in black.
“These flowers, offered by the most grateful of his pupils, are the
emblem of his glory.”
[Illustration: PLATE VIII.--LA LAITIÈRE
“La Laitière,” or “The Milkmaid,” may perhaps be given as quite
the most representative of Greuze’s works. The affected pose and
simpering smile, the unsuitability and over-arrangement of the
dress, are as characteristic of the painter as the perfect grace
of the _ensemble_, the delicious coquetry of the attitude, the
dimpled roundness of the form, and, above all, the sparkle in
the clear eyes and the exquisite bloom of the flesh. The picture
is in the Louvre.]