VI
THE END
To Paris Fragonard crept back, he and his family, to his old quarters at the Louvre, when Napoleon was come to power, and the guillotine was slaked with blood. He returned to Paris a poor old man.
The enthusiasm was gone out of his invention, the volition out of his hand’s cunning, the breath out of his career. He was out of the fashion; a man risen from the dead. His efforts to catch the spirit of the time were pathetic. He painted rarely now. He won a passing success with an historic canvas or so, done in the new manner. But what did Fragonard know of political allegories? what enthusiasm had he for the famous days of the Revolution? what were caricature or satire to him, any more than the heroic splendour of Greece and Rome? The gods of elegance were dead; a severe and frigid morality stood upon their altars.
We have a pen-picture of the old painter at this time—short, big of head, stout, full-bodied, brisk, alert, ever gay; he has red cheeks, sparkling eyes, grey hair very much frizzed out; he is to be seen wandering about the Louvre dressed in a cloak or overcoat of a mixed grey cloth, without hooks or eyes or buttons—a cloak which the old man, when he is at work, ties at the waist with it does not matter what—a piece of string, a crumpled chiffon. Every one loves “little father Fragonard.” Through every shock of good and evil fortune he remains alert and cheerful. The old face smiles even through tears.
Thus, walking with aging step towards the end, he saw Napoleon created Emperor of the French, his triumphant career marred only at rare intervals by such disasters as Trafalgar—heard perhaps of the suicide of the unfortunate but gallant Villeneuve at the disgrace of trial by court-martial for this very loss of Trafalgar.
In the year of 1806, on the New Year’s Day of which were abolished the Republican reckonings of the years as established at the Revolution, suddenly came the suppression of the artists’ lodging at the Louvre by decree of the Emperor. The Fragonards went to live hard by in the house of the restaurant-keeper Very, in the Rue Grenelle Saint-Honoré. The move was for Fragonard but the prelude to a longer journey.
The old artist walks now more sluggishly than of old, his four-and-seventy years have taken the briskness out of his step. Returning from the Champ de Mars on a sultry day in August he becomes heated—enters a café to eat an ice; congestion of the brain sets in. At five of the clock in the morning of the 22nd day of August 1806, Fragonard enters into the eternal sleep—at the hour that his master Boucher had gone to sleep.
Thus passed away the last of the great painters of France’s gaiety and lightness of heart.
Madame Fragonard lived to be seventy-seven, dying in 1824. Marguerite Gérard had a happy career as an artist under the Empire and the Restoration, but never married—dying at seventy-six, loaded with honours and in comfortable circumstances in the year that Queen Victoria came to the throne of England. Thus peacefully ended the days of Fragonard and his immediate kin after the turmoil and fierce tragic years of the Terror.