ENVOI
“‘Squelette des Grâces’ they called me!
Yea, and now? Sans-graces! A mere ‘Squelette!’
But grace I had, and have, to-day
O’er those whom Death did not forget.”
CHAPTER XXII
DESPRÉAUX, POET AND—HUSBAND OF GUIMARD
There can be nothing more irksome to a man than to be known merely as the husband of his more famous wife.
In speaking, however, of Despréaux as “husband of Guimard,” it is not my intention to cast any slight on an estimable and, in his own time, well-known personality; but I do so merely that the reader will thereby be able to “place” her genial and accomplished husband, M. Despréaux to whom reference has already been made. He was born in 1748, five years after Mlle. Guimard, and was the son of a musician at the Paris Opera, where he himself was entered as a supernumerary-dancer in 1764. He made rapid progress in the art of his choice and won increasing reputation until, unhappily a wound in the foot completely closed his career as a “star,” and being a man of much theatrical experience and general culture, he then became a maître de ballet and also gave dancing lessons. In 1789 he married Madeleine Guimard, whom he had long worshipped, and the two retired, as we know, at the opening of the Revolution to a cosy nest on the heights of Montmartre. So high, indeed, were they and so steep was the roadway approaching their dwelling, that the patrols refrained from troubling them, and save for financial losses, and rumours of revolution and distant guns, the couple remained untroubled by the red and raging Anarchy in the city stretched at their feet.