Four years after the death of the Pompadour the patient neglected queen, amiable dull Marie Leczinska, followed her supplanter to the grave. The king’s grief and contrition and his solemn vows to mend his ways came somewhat over-late; they lasted little longer than the drying of his floods of tears over the body of his dead consort.
On the Eve of Candlemas, the first day of February 1769, at a convivial party in Paris that was not wholly without political significance, a Jesuit priest raised his glass To the Presentation! adding after the toast—“To that which has taken place to-day, or will take place to-morrow, the presentation of the new Esther, who is to replace Haman and release the Jewish nation from oppression!”
He spoke figuratively—it was safer so. But ’twas understood. Indeed, the pretty sentiment was well received by the old aristocrats and young bloods about the table; and they drank a bumper to the pretty Madame du Barry. For the Jesuits had no love for the king’s minister Choiseul—and the madcap girl was but the lure whereby the king was to be drawn from his great minister. So religion rallied about the frail beauty, and hid behind her extravagant skirts—one of which cost close on £2000—and, with the old nobility, drank damnation to the king’s minister and To the devil with the new thought and with parliaments. Long live the king and the divine right of kings!
Our worthy priest seems to have had the ear of destiny, though he dated his certainty near upon a couple of months too soon.
So it came about that before a year was out the old king was become the doting creature of a light-o’-love of Paris, the transfigured milliner and street-pedlar, Jeanne, natural child of one Anne Béqus, a low woman of Vaucouleurs. This Jeanne, of no surname and unknown father, a pretty, kindly, vulgar child of the gutters, with fair hair and of madcap habits, was some twenty-six years of age, when—being reborn under a forged birth-certificate at the king’s ordering, as Anne de Vaubernier, and being married by the same orders to the Count du Barry, an obliging nobleman of the court—she appeared at Versailles as the immortally frail Countess du Barry.
The remonstrances of Choiseul with the king against this new degradation of the throne of France, and his unconcealed scorn and disgust of the upstart countess, made a dangerous enemy for France’s great minister, and was to cost him and his France very dear.
The king’s infatuation brought royalty into utter contempt amongst the people. It was to cost France a terrible price—and Fragonard not least of all.
One of the first gifts from the king to the Du Barry was the little castle of Louveciennes; and she proceeded with reckless extravagance to furnish her handsome home. Drouais, the artist, sold to her for 1200 livres (double florins), as overdoors for one of the rooms, four panels that he had bought from Fragonard. They have vanished; but they served Fragonard a good turn—he received an order to decorate Du Barry’s luxurious pavilion of Luciennes, which she had had built to entertain the king at her “little suppers.”
Thus it chanced that for this wilful light-o’-love Fragonard painted the great master-work of his life—the five world-famous canvases of the series of “The Progress of Love in the Heart of Maidenhood,” or, as they are better known, “The Romance of Love and Youth”—the old king masquerading therein as a young shepherd, and the Du Barry as a shepherdess. In “The Ladder” (“L’Escalade” or “Le Rendezvous”) the Du Barry plays the part of a timid young girl who starts as she sees her shepherd-lover to be the king; the “Pursuit” follows; then the “Souvenirs” and “Love Crowned.” The last of the five, the discarded mistress in “Deserted,” was only begun; and was not completed by Fragonard until twenty years later at Grasse, to complete the set.
What it was that struck a chill into the frail Du Barry’s favour, so that the masterpieces of Fragonard never entered within her doors, is not fully known. Whatsoever the cause, these canvases were rejected by her. It is said that the work was found to be disappointing, being lacking as to the indecencies by the Du Barry and the king, who preferred the more suggestive panels of Vien. It is true that Fragonard’s earlier four panels which she possessed were in questionable taste, and that these five were pure; indeed, their trivial story matters little amidst the massy foliage and the majestic trees that spring into the swinging heavens. Fragonard suspected, and somewhat resented the suspicion, that he was being made to paint in a sort of artistic duel with Vien. At any rate, Vien was chosen. So it came that the discarded pictures lay in Fragonard’s studio for over twenty years, when we shall see them, rolled up, making a chief part of the strange baggage of Fragonard’s flight from his beloved Paris.