Yet Louis of France spake prophecy—if unwitting of it. The guillotine was not to have him. In 1774 he was stricken down with the small-pox, and the sick-room in the palace saw the Du Barry and her party fight a duel with Choiseul’s party for his possession—never, surely, was a more grim, more fantastic warfare than that bitter intrigue to get the confessor to the king’s bedside, that meant the dismissal of the favourite before he should be allowed to receive the Absolution—in which the strange blasphemy was enacted of the Eucharist being hustled about the passages, whilst the bigots strove against its administration, and the freethinkers demanded the last consolation of the Church. On the 10th of May the small-pox took his distempered body, “already a mass of corruption,” that was hastily flung into a coffin and hurried without pomp, or circumstance, or pretence of honours to St. Denis—being rattled thereto at the trot, the crowd that lined the way showering epigrams not wholly friendly upon its passing; and was buried amongst the bones of the ancient kings of his race, unattended by the Court, and amidst the contempt and loud curses of his people.
Even the poor weeping Du Barry was gone, hustled from the palace at the wandering orders of the dying delirious king. D’Aiguillon also, and Maupeou and Terray were gone. And the Court was hailing the new king and his queen—ill-fated Louis the Sixteenth and tactless Marie Antoinette.
The scandalous levity of the privileged class of the day, and its ruthless vindictiveness when thwarted, had near done their work. A proud and gallant people touched bottom in humiliation. The pens of the wits and thinkers sent the new opinion broadcast amongst a people wholly scandalised and punished by the corruption of their governors. These writings made astounding and alarming way. The “intellectuals” were all on the side of the people—Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Helvetius, Condillac, the Abbé Raynal. With wit and sarcasm and invective and argument, they stirred passions, appealing to self-respect and dignity and honour and the innate love of freedom in the strong; they appealed to common-sense, to the craving for liberty in man’s being, to the rights of the individual; and the printing-press scattered their wit and wisdom throughout the land to the uttermost corners of France. They sneered away false aristocracy, false religion. They wrought to overthrow the old order, and brought it into contempt. And they needed to manufacture no evidence. France had lain supine, a mighty people as they proved themselves when their right arms were freed—lain in chains under the heel of a king who had been capable of setting their necks under the feet of a trivial and foolish woman, whose nursery had been the gutter.
Yet Du Barry, when all her faults are set against her, suffered undue execration. She had no grain of ill-will in her nature. During her reign the Bastille received no prisoner at her ordering—vengeance was not in her. She was the tool of unscrupulous men; but she came between them and their base vengeances, and kept the Court free from the brutalities that the Pompadour meted out to her enemies without a pang of remorse. During the whole of her reign, she visited her old mother every fortnight, and lavished benefits on her kin—whom most women, thus suddenly raised to the noblesse, would have avoided like a plague. The scoundrels who made her their toy were responsible for every evil deed that she was accused of committing. And even the new king, whose sharp lettre de cachet, written two days after he came to the throne, banished her to a convent, soon relented, and allowed her to go back to her home at Luciennes. The Du Barry had striven to abolish the lettre de cachet; the new king brought it back, inaugurating his reign by having one sent to the woman whose gentleness and kindliness had shrunk from the accursed thing. It was a fit omen of the well-meaning but incompetent king’s tragic reign which was about to begin.
To Fragonard these things were but tattle; yet the doing of them was to reach to his hearth; the consequences of them were to strip him bare and wreck him—he was to see his wife and womenkind dragging through the streets of Paris to beg bread and meat at the gates of the city. But the future was mercifully hidden from him. He was now at the height of his career; and was to taste wider success.
PLATE VII.—THE FAIR-HAIRED BOY
(In the Wallace Collection)
To the visitor to the Wallace collection the picture by Fragonard next best known after the “Chiffre d’Amour” and the “Swing,” is this exquisite study of a fair-haired boy—the child is painted with a subtle grace and consummate delicacy rarely combined with the directness and impressionism here displayed by Fragonard.
Fragonard’s name will always be linked with that of his friend and patron, a wealthy man, the farmer-general Bergeret de Grandcour. His family visited at the rich man’s houses in town and country.