[188] Report of Meunier to Berryer, Lieutenant of Police, Archives de la Bastille, xii.
[189] Edmond de Goncourt, Mademoiselle Clairon, p. 170.
[190] We read in Mlle. Clairon's Mémoires: "'The walls alone of this house,' I said to myself, 'ought to make me feel the sublimity of the poet, and enable me to attain the talent of the actress. It is in this sanctuary that I ought to live and die.'" We fear that the sanctuary was, on occasion, somewhat profaned, since the lady was in the habit of entertaining here not only dames of high degree, but some of the most dissolute members of Paris society.
[191] "M. Carle Van Loo's picture, in which Mlle. Clairon is painted as Medea, had a great reputation while it was still unfinished. Hardly had the artist opened his studio, than all Paris crowded to admire his chef d'œuvre. Never did work obtain more unanimous praise."—Le Tableau de Mlle. Clairon, par M. Carle Vanloo, a manuscript document cited by Edmond de Goncourt. When it was nearly completed, Louis XV. expressed a wish to see it, and came to Van Loo's studio, while the actress was sitting to him. "You are indeed fortunate," said he to the painter, "to have been inspired by such a model;" and, turning to the lady, added: "And you, Mademoiselle, have reason to congratulate yourself on being immortalised by such an artist." He then announced his intention of defraying the cost of the frame, which came to 5000 livres.
[192] Forty thousand francs a year, a house, a coach, and a table for six persons.
[193] Mémoires de Mademoiselle Clairon (edit. 1799), 307 et seq.
[194] In reference to the arrangement of these names, Monnet wrote to Garrick: "The drawing you gave Mlle. Clairon is engraved; it is now on sale, and M. de Crébillon is annoyed because they have placed his father after Voltaire, that is to say, below him: it is the last of the volumes on which Mlle. Clairon is leaning. I have thrown the blame on M. Gravelot, telling him that you held too high an opinion of his father's talent to commit such an error."—"Private Correspondence of David Garrick," ii. 442.
[195] Collé, Journal et Mémoires, iii. 6. Collé was himself intensely disgusted by the conduct of Mlle. Clairon's fanatical admirers, and declares that if medals were to be struck in honour of an actress, who, after all, was nothing but a parrot, then statues—nay, pyramids—ought to be raised to the authors whose works she interpreted.
[196] She refused first, the protection, and, afterwards, the hand of the Marquis de Gouffier, the latter on the ground that "while esteeming herself too much to be his mistress, she esteemed herself too little to be his wife." On her retirement from the stage in 1783, Louis XVI. granted her a special pension, "as if to show that virtue under his reign was as profitable as vice had been under his predecessor."—Hawkins, "The French Stage in the Eighteenth Century," ii. 107 and 299.
[197] L' Année Littéraire par M. Fréron, Lettre V. Janvier 17, cited by Edmond de Goncourt.