Seeing him at this period of his career, the pet of princes, and earning vast sums of money, it is difficult to realise Greuze could ever have fallen on evil days, have come to actual want. Yet so it was to be.
The visit of the Emperor Joseph II. referred to by Madame Roland, and followed by a command for a picture, a present of 4000 ducats, and the conferring of the title of baron on the painter, was the high-water mark in his career. And the tide of success was not only to turn, but to recede with tragic rapidity.
PLATE VII.—LA CRUCHE CASSÉE
“La Cruche Cassée,” or “The Broken Pitcher,” is too well known in every form of reproduction to need description. It hangs in the Louvre, and is always surrounded by eager copyists, who strive, very frequently in vain, to reproduce the delicate tints of the flesh and the vague, wondering expression in the eyes of the charming heroine.
CHAPTER VII
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.