It was an age of small oratory. Every man who could string a neat sentence together, scribbled or harangued. It was boorish and an unfashionable thing not to be an author, a poetaster, a little orator, a critic, a dabbler in the arts. At coffee-houses or clubs, wheresoever men foregathered, some fellow would mount a table and harangue his friends. The bloods caught the vogue, little foreseeing that it made a hotbed for the airing of discontents, and for the parading of ideals which alone could blot out those discontents. All took to it like ducks to the village pond. There was much quackery; some honest noise.
Now it so chanced that at Vigée Le Brun's there was a gathering at which Le Brun—"Pindar" Le Brun the poet—spouting a discourse, described a Greek supper. The idea at once sprang up that they should have one straightway; they got up the cook and started to set the thing going, the poet guiding the making of the sauces. Amidst the general merriment Vigée Le Brun suggested that they should dress for the fantastic affair in Greek costume, and arrange the tables and seats after the antique fashion. So the jocular business went apace. It was a merry party of Athenians that sat down to the feast—"Pindar" Le Brun wearing laurels in his ridiculous hair, and a purple mantle round about him; the Marquis de Cubières tricked out with a guitar as a golden lyre; Vigée Le Brun being chief costumier to the frolic, draping Chaudet the sculptor and others in as near Greek fashion as could be. Vigée Le Brun, herself in white robes and tunic, and garlanded with flowers and veiled, seems to have presided over a rollicking gathering. The noise of the jollification got abroad.
The banquet cost the frugal Vigée Le Brun some fifteen francs in all; but in the mouths of the spiteful the tale of its extravagance quickly grew. A few days afterwards there was talk of it at Court; and the king was solemnly assured by "one who knew," that it had cost 20,000 francs.
This unfortunate Greek supper dogged her steps in the wanderings over the face of Europe that were to be her long exile. At Rome she was to discover that it had cost her 40,000 francs; at Vienna it was to rise to 60,000; and when she reached St. Petersburg she was to find that, gathering volume on the long journey, it had increased to 80,000 francs, when she scotched the lie and killed it; but not before it had served her a very ugly turn.
The truth was that she was being made to share the unpopularity that had fallen upon the queen. She was painting, and was on friendly terms with, not only the Royal Family, but with the unpopular ministers and servants of the crown, and with the noblesse, who in league with the queen were chiefly concerned in keeping the king from popular measures. She painted, according to the authorities, in 1785, in her thirtieth year, the portrait of Calonne though a parchment in the engraving from it bears the date 1787. The portrait of the minister set slander going against the artist, as regards the vast sum paid for it. The portrait of the seated minister ends below the knees; and it was of this picture of the weak Calonne, who clung so limpet-like to office, that Sophie Arnould, seeing it at the Salon, made the neat remark: "It is because he sticks to office that Madame Le Brun has cut off his legs." But whether she received much or little mattered not much to Vigée Le Brun; her husband seized and squandered all she earned. As a matter of fact, she received 3600 francs for the portrait from Calonne, sent in a handsome box worth 1200 francs—a couple of hundred pounds at the outside. It was a small price compared to the sums she was now receiving for portraits; Beaujou, the financier, paid 8000 francs (say 300 guineas); Prince Lubomirski 20,000 francs (£800)—not that the poor maker of these works gained thereby, for her precious picture-dealer husband had it according to his habit, and she had difficulty and a scene even to get two louis from the price when she asked the rogue for it. However, her reputation ever increased. She showed at this same Salon of 1785, in her thirtieth year, the portrait of the little Dauphin of four years and his seven-year-old sister, the Madame Royale, seated on a bank, the boy's hat thrown at his feet upon the flower-strewn ground—a work in which her colour-sense, her fine arrangement, and her feeling for style reach to their highest flight. It is perhaps the most wholly successful and most complete and masterly canvas of her long career. It hangs in Versailles, a pathetic comment, this happy moment in the children's life, when the days looked rosy and all the world was a beautiful garden.
At the Salon of 1787, in her thirty-second year, is record of a picture of "Marie Antoinette and her Children"; and of herself with her girl; and, amongst others, those of Mademoiselle Dugazon and of Madame Molé-Raymond. This famous painting of Madame Molé-Raymond, the pretty actress of the Comédie Française, is one of Vigée Le Brun's masterpieces. Her brush is now at its most dexterous use; the laughing pretty woman is caught like a live thing and fixed upon the canvas as at a stroke as she trips across the vision, with muff upraised, smiling out upon us as she passes. Vigée Le Brun never stated character with more consummate skill than here; never set down action with more vivid brush, catching movement flying; she never stated life more truly nor with more exquisite tact than in this bright vision of a dainty woman of the theatre.
Affairs in France were now in such a huddle that the State could not pay interest on the public loans. Calonne could no longer disguise the serious business from himself or the king. There was nothing for it but to call the Assembly of Notables. They met at Versailles on the 22nd of February 1787. Calonne fell, to give place to his enemy the turbulent and stupid Cardinal de Brienne. The Court was completely foul of the people when De Brienne threw up office in the midst of riots in Paris and throughout the country, and, in panic, fled to Italy, leaving the Government in dire confusion and distress.
The king took a wise course; he recalled Neckar. The convoking of the States-General now became a certainty. Paris rang with the hoarse cry for the Third Estate. The wrangle as to the constitution of the States-General became every day more dangerous.
The last portrait that Vigée Le Brun painted of the doomed queen was the canvas that hangs at Versailles known as "Marie Antoinette and her Children," in which the queen is seen seated beside a cradle with the baby Duke of Normandy on her knee, the little Madame Royale at her side, and the small Dauphin pointing into the cradle. When the doors of the Salon of 1788 were thrown open the painting was not quite finished; and for some days the frame reserved for it remained empty. It was on the eve of what was to become the Revolution, and the country was speaking now in no hushed whispers of the public deficit in the nation's treasury, and gazing bewildered at the bankruptcy that threatened the land. The empty frame drew forth the bitter jest: "Voilà le déficit!" The little Dauphin's pointing at the cradle was not to be without its significance—for the little fellow was to die at the outbreak of the Revolution and his place was to be taken by the babe on his mother's knee—the small Duke of Normandy was to become Dauphin in his place, and, in some few years, with his little sister, was to be made a close prisoner in the Temple. The king and the queen, separated from their children and each other, were to go out to the guillotine; the girl was to live through the seething hell of the Terror as by a miracle, and thereafter unhappily enough as the Duchess of Angoulême; but the fair boy, heir to one of the noblest heritages in all this vast world, torn from Marie Antoinette whilst the queen still lived, a prisoner, was to be handed to the tender mercies of the infamous Simon, jailor at the Temple, who was to train the frightened child to drink and swear and sing with piping treble the camagnole, until, hidden away in a tower of the prison, he was to die like a frightened hunted thing, his shirt not changed for months—die in darkness and squalor and in a filthy state. The guillotine did no mightier act of simple godlike vengeance than the day it sheared the skull from the foul neck of cordwainer Simon.