Brought up, as the child was, in the world of artists, with the aims and ambitions and enthusiasms of artists for her very breath, she could not fail to find in such a world, besides the encouragement which was prodigally bestowed upon so young and promising a talent, the teaching needful to develop her powers. Amongst the artists who were on friendly terms with the girl's father, and of whom Doyen was the most intimate, was Davesne, a member and deputy professor of the Academy of St. Luke—he who afterwards claimed to have taught the little Elizabeth the elements of painting. Davesne's lessons were at best but few, and seem to have been limited to showing the eager child how to set a palette. The girl was in fact picking up the crumbs that fell from many tables; at any rate she showed astoundingly precocious industry and gifts, and was soon making quite a stir amongst the painter-folk, and becoming a source of pride to her father.
Vigée, however, was only destined to guide and encourage the child towards the path; he died on the 9th of May 1768 from swallowing a fish bone. Little Elizabeth was but thirteen years old when this first great grief fell upon her.
That was a strange world in which the child stood bewildered at the baffling cruelty of human destiny—this eighteenth-century France. The Pompadour had died in the child's ninth year; her dogged and persistent enemy, the Dauphin, the year after her; the neglected queen now followed the Pompadour to the grave in the June of this same year that left little Elizabeth fatherless.
Under the scandals of the Court, and the tyranny and corruption of the nobility and clergy, the French people were no longer concealing their distress under courtly phrases, nor groaning in secret. The ideas of the new philosophers were penetrating and colouring public opinion. They were beginning to talk of the great antique days of Greece, of heroes, and of virtue, and of living and dying like Romans. Fickle fashion was turning her back upon the art of old Boucher, and upon Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses and pleasant landscapes and bosky groves, and was taking up her abode with heroes and amongst picturesque ruins. The Parliament men were demanding rights, were indeed going to prison and into banishment for those rights; nay, was not Choiseul the great minister of France; and Choiseul's power was deep planted in the rights of the people and founded on Parliaments. All France was watching for the dawn of liberty.
II
THE WONDERFUL CHILD
The thirteen-year-old child suffered a grief so poignant at the loss of her father, to whom she had been passionately attached, that it threatened to have the gravest consequences on her future; had it not been for her father's old friend Doyen, who, transferring to the girl the deep affection he had had for the dead man, urged the child to take up her brushes again—for she was already painting from Nature.
It was now that she entered the studio of Gabriel Briard, an historical painter and member of the Royal Academy; a mediocre artist (though superior to Davesne, who claimed to have been her teacher), but he was a fine draughtsman.
To Briard's studio she went with a little friend, a year older than herself, Mademoiselle Bocquet, who was to become like herself a member of the Academy of Saint Luke; a girl of a certain talent who, however, abandoned painting on her early marriage.