Boucher

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Boucher, by Haldane Macfall
MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR EDITED BY—T. LEMAN HARE
BOUCHER 1703-1770
PLATE I.—MADAME DE POMPADOUR. Frontispiece (In the National Gallery of Scotland)
Edinburgh is fortunate in possessing this, one of the world-famous examples of Boucher’s exquisite portraiture. He painted with rare charm more than once this wonderful woman, “the king’s morsel,” Jeanne Poisson, Madame Lenormant d’Etioles, who became the notorious Marquise de Pompadour. He gives us perhaps too dainty a butterfly; for, of a truth, this woman’s prettiness masked an iron nerve, an unflinching courage, and a capacity and talents which must have reached to fame in any human being whose frame they illumined. Nor is there hint of those hard qualities that robbed her of mercy, nor allowed her to bend an ear to suffering.
BY HALDANE MACFALL
ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR
IN SEMPITERNUM.
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

The year after good Queen Anne came to rule over us, Louis the Fourteenth being still King of France, on an autumn day in the October of 1703, that saw the trees of Paris shedding their parched leaves as a carpet to the feet of the much-bewigged dandified folk who stepped it swaggeringly down the walks of the Palais Royal, swinging long canes, and strutting along the shaded promenades of the more fashionable places of the city, there stood in the vestry of the parish church of Saint Jean-en-Grève a little group of the small burgess folk, gathered about a little infant, whilst the tipstaff to the king’s palace, one François Prévost, signed solemnly as witness to the birth-certificate and as acknowledged godfather to the aforesaid morsel of humanity, which, as the certificate badly set forth in black and white for ever, was henceforth to be known for good or ill as François Boucher, first-born son, on the 29th of September, four days past, of the tipstaff’s friend, Nicolas Boucher, “maître-peintre,” who stood hard by, and of his wife Elizabeth Lemesle.