People had wondered how Guimard had managed to keep exactly the same appearance for so many years. This was the secret! When she was twenty she had a portrait painted that was true to life and afterwards, for some twenty years or so, every morning she would study this and make herself up to resemble it exactly; and neither lover nor friend was ever admitted to this toilette.
This was an ingenious idea, but it could not last for ever. It is all the more interesting then to note the next important incident in Guimard’s career. Ninon de l’Enclos, acting on the principle that it’s never too late to have a lover, flirted when she was ninety. Guimard gave up lovers when she was past forty and took a husband, a man, moreover, whom she had known for years.
In 1789, Guimard retired from the Opera; in 1789 she married Jean Despréaux, dancer and poet; and in 1789 the gathering storms of Revolution broke and Paris, smitten first by famine, became for the next few years a hell, in which strangely enough, there was still a demand for entertainment lighter and less fervid than massacre.
When Guimard and Despréaux—comrades for at least twenty-five years—married, they settled down, on a fairly comfortable income, derived from their pensions and acquired property, at Montmartre and one of Jean’s poems gives a charming picture of their retreat in those troubled times. But during the Revolution, State finances were in disorder, and pensions were curtailed or discontinued and all the old favourites of the Opera were more or less involved in difficulties. In 1792, the city of Paris having confided the care of the Opera to Francoeur and Celerier, they nominated Despréaux director of the theatre and a member of the administrative committee, but this did not last. The following year Francoeur and Celerier were imprisoned, the actors were authorised to manage the theatre themselves and Despréaux—whose father, by the way, who had been leader of the orchestra at the Opera, killed himself the same year from despair at the general ruin around him—was allotted some part in the management of the public fêtes.
In 1796—the year of the establishment of the Directory—Madeleine made a reappearance at a benefit given on January 23rd for the veteran performers at the Opera who had all suffered grievous losses in the Revolution. In 1807, three years after the crowning of Napoleon, by which time the national ferment had begun to settle down a little and the languished arts to take hope again, an Imperial decree dated July 29th, reduced the number of theatres in Paris to eight, and the Académie Impériale de Musique—as it was now called—had for Director, Picard, the comic poet, and for “inspecteur”—Despréaux.
But these casual and precarious employments were not enough to remedy the losses that husband and wife sustained in the lean and fevered years from 1789, when they settled down in their high-perched nest overlooking all Paris in Montmartre until 1807, when Despréaux became again attached to the Opera, and that this employment too did not last we know from a letter which Madeleine wrote to a friend in 1814 imploring him to use his influence with people at Court to obtain from Louis XVIII some position for her husband, a letter in which she mentions the loss of their entire fortune owing to the Revolution and pleads that “nos besoins sont bien urgents.”
There is then every probability that their needs really were urgent. Guimard had never been charged with thrift; and Despréaux was a poet. Both started married life with a fair capital—all things henceforth held in common of course, according to the law—but fortune was against them, and though they might perhaps have weathered the storm had they been twenty years younger, it was almost inevitable that, their pensions gone, their capital diminishing, they should find the struggle growing yearly harder and their chances of replenishing their coffers less and less. De Goncourt gives what one cannot but feel is a too idyllic picture of the last years of the old couple, mainly on the basis of Jean’s poems (and he was ever an optimist!) but he also gives us one true, interesting, and poignant glimpse of Madeleine as an old lady who, with her toy theatre, would, for the amusement of friends who chanced to drop in, go through the scenes of former splendour and with her frail fingers perform the steps that had made her famous in many a ballet of the past.
Apparently Madeleine’s appeal to friends at Court must have had some success for Despréaux. In the following year, 1815, he was appointed inspector-general of the Court entertainments, and professor “de danse et de grâces” at the Conservatoire. But it is probable that only the last three or four years of their married life brought them any return of fortune.
Madeleine Guimard
(From the painting by Fragonard).