In little over a month the States-General was become the self-constituted National Assembly; a few days later, on the 20th of June, the deputies took the solemn oath in the tennis-court—the jeu de paume. At the queen's foolish urging the king fell back on force; filled Paris with troops under De Broglie; dismissed Neckar. The people at once took to arms. The 14th of July saw the fall of the hated Bastille. On the 22nd the people hanged Foulon to the street-lamp at the corner of the Place de Grève—and thenceforth the terrible shout à la lanterne! became the cry of fashion.
Such was the dawn of the Revolution in the streets of Paris, upon which Vigée Le Brun's eyes gazed down terrified in her thirty-fourth year.
Quickly followed the rumblings of the dark thunder-clouds that came up in threatening blackness behind the dawn—and which were about to burst with a roar upon reckless Paris.
The king showed astounding courage and considerable capacity during these awful days; but his work was constantly thwarted and ruined by the Court party and the queen. On the 3rd of October the officers of the regiment of Flanders were foolishly entertained at Versailles, and the whole Court being present, the white cockade of the Bourbons was distributed amidst rapturous approval, and the national tricolour trodden under foot. The starving rabble of Paris knew it, by the next day; and headed by a band of frantic women, set out for Versailles on the morning of the 5th of October, under the leadership of the ruffian Maillard who had distinguished himself at the capture of the Bastille. They overran the palace. The king again showed superb nerve; and the mob, abashed and admiring, calling "Long live the king!" withdrew to the courtyards. The unfortunate brawl in the courtyard followed; and the mishap of the night. The next day the Royal Family had to make their humiliating journey with the rabble to Paris.
Small hope for Vigée Le Brun, unless she stole out of France, and at once. She stood, indeed, in perilous plight. Her relations with the Court, and with the nobility, made every hour that she stayed in Paris a greater danger to her life. It was dangerous to go into the streets—dangerous to leave Paris—but for Vigée Le Brun more dangerous to stay. She was a marked woman. There was for her one sole way from death, and it was flight. By delaying she risked also the life of her child. Her friends begged her to be gone. She took the girl; searched hurriedly for all the money she could lay hands on—her husband had taken all but eighty francs (some three guineas)—and, leaving her canvases where they stood unfinished, she passed out of the studio that had been all the world to her; the place where she had spent the happiest hours of her life. A few days before, she had had to refuse to begin a portrait of the future Duchess de Noailles—to save her own head, not to paint those of others, was now become her single aim.
On the 5th of October of this year of 1789, that fearsome day that saw the rabble marching to Versailles, Vigée Le Brun took her seat in a diligence with her little girl, seated between a thief and a jacobin; the diligence rattled along the cobbles of her beloved city, and out of the gates—in such fashion Vigée Le Brun left Paris and took the road for Italy.
V
SWEET EXILE
As she rattled out of Paris between her grim companions, Vigée Le Brun little thought that her exile would last a dozen years; but everywhere she went she was destined to be welcomed with honour; and wheresoever she roamed—and she ranged across the face of the land wellnigh from end to end of it—she was to receive the same ovations, meet with the same success, be rewarded with the highest honours.