A little while before her fifteenth birthday her mother married again a young jeweller, of the name of Le Sèvre, a miserly fellow, who, under the pretext of taking them into the country, hired a little house at Chaillot, where they went with the girl for their Sundays; the thrifty stepfather planting its garden with the gay blossoms of the useful haricot-bean and the nasturtium. He had a frugal mind.
The petty tyrannies of the thrifty jeweller, his mean outlook on life, and his sordid aims, made of the habits and atmosphere of his class an even more uncongenial world for this brilliant girl to live in. Happily the pursuit of her art, and the friendship of that circle into which that art and her gifts and charming personality raised her, mitigated the tyranny of this sordid relationship. And, to add to her relief, Madame Suzanne, wife of the sculptor, and a friend of her mother, would carry off the girl with her into the country; and it was during one of their walks at Marly that she met for the first time Marie Antoinette.
On the 10th of May 1774, a month before Elizabeth Vigée's nineteenth birthday, King Louis the Fifteenth died of the small-pox—died without a friend, for he had dismissed the Du Barry in tears a short while before. His body was hastily thrust into a coffin, and hurried at the trot through the darkness to St. Denis, for fear of attack from the sullen crowds that gathered to do it dishonour; so was he huddled away amongst the bones of the ancient kings of his race, unattended by the Court, and amidst the curses of his people.
Louis the Sixteenth, son of Louis Fifteenth's only son, the dead Dauphin, ascended the throne of France in his twentieth year, a pure-minded, honourable young fellow, full of good intentions, and sincerely anxious for the well-being of his people; but of a diffident temper, timid, hesitating, and uncertain in decision, and under the influence of his young consort, the beautiful Queen Marie Antoinette, who had the imperious temper of her house, wedded to light and frivolous manners; she brought to her counsels a deplorable lack of judgment and a steadfast incompetence in knowledge of men.
The good qualities of this young pair had been very well in private life; but France needed greater abilities for her guidance than the simple virtues. It was a hideous part of the destiny of this young couple that they came to rule over a France that was passionately angered at the misdeeds of a king and his privileged class of nobles and clergy who had gone before them—of a class that had come unscathed through that reign, and were grown incapable of realising that they could not come unscathed through another.
The Du Barry flown, and her precious trio of ministers with her, Louis recalled the crafty old schemer Maurepas to power from the banishment into which the Pompadour had sent him; but he otherwise began well by making Turgot his minister of finance.
On the 25th of October in this 1774 that saw Louis Quinze and Marie Antoinette come to the throne of France, Elizabeth Vigée was elected to the Academy of St. Luke at nineteen years of age.
She brought to her early successes a charming modesty and an utter absence of conceit or of pose that added greatly to her reputation, and paved the way to further honours.