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.”
