MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD
But early success was not to be without black care stepping into the triumphal car in her procession towards an early and wide fame of this charming and accomplished young woman of twenty. Honours were easy. But the devil was in the machinery.
Her family had lived in the Rue de Cléry, opposite the hotel Lubert; thence they had drifted to the Rue St. Honoré hard by the Palais Royal; they now returned to the Rue de Cléry to the hotel Lubert itself. Here it chanced that Le Brun, the expert, carried on a lucrative traffic in pictures. His gallery attracted the pretty artist, who could study there at leisure the works of the great masters that passed through.
The two families soon became intimate. Le Brun carefully weighing the great advantages that such a union could bring to him, but entangled by his engagement to marry the daughter of a Dutch dealer in pictures who lived opposite to him, and with whom he had considerable business in works of art, beat about as to how he could marry Elizabeth Vigée. The girl was living in the splendour of a circle to which her family could not hope to aspire; the picture-dealer belonged to the middle-class in which her own family moved. Any day she might marry out of that middle-class world into the world of fashion. He saw that the girl moved in, and was happiest in, a great world to which he had not the key. He had the ambition to belong to that world, though his common-sense might have told him that he never could do more than hang about its outer courts. He was a calculating blackguard, a man of loose life, and a vulgar fellow with vulgar ambitions. He saw astutely enough that this girl was well on the high-road to considerable fortune. The Dutch girl opposite necessitated wary walking. He played the romantic lover, and before six months were run out he was pressing his suit, asking Elizabeth Vigée to marry him secretly.
PLATE IV.—PORTRAIT OF MADAME VIGÉE LE BRUN
(In the National Gallery, London)
She saw at Anvers the famous "Chapeau de paille" by Rubens. This canvas by Rubens clearly inspired her to the painting of the portrait of herself in a straw hat, where she stands bathed in the sunlight, her palette in her hand. The painting of the flesh of the pretty face is exquisite, and in spite of intense finish is broadly conceived and rich and glowing in colour. The clumsy drawing of the hand that holds the palette is the only defect in this, one of her masterpieces. The picture has the added interest of revealing to us how Vigée Le Brun set her palette. The thing is thrilling with life; and the little feminine conceit of wearing her black wrap is quaintly delightful.
