Mme. de Verdun said no more, but went away and sent the doctor. Lisette dismissed him, but he remained concealed in the house until night. The child was born about ten o’clock, and Lisette was at once passionately fond of it, and as unfortunately foolish in her management of it as she was in the way she conducted all her affairs except her painting. She indulged and spoilt it in so deplorable a manner that she ruined her daughter’s disposition and her own comfort and happiness.
She had another daughter a year or two later that only lived a short time.
Mme. Le Brun took the greatest pleasure in her intercourse with the Queen. Having heard that she had a good voice and was passionately fond of music, Marie Antoinette asked her to sing some of the duets of Grétry with her; and scarcely ever afterwards did a sitting take place without their playing and singing together.
Besides all these portraits of the Queen, Mme. Le Brun painted the King, all the rest of the royal family except the Comte d’Artois; the Duke and Duchess of Orléans, the Princesse de Lamballe, the Duchesse de Polignac, and, in fact, almost everybody.
Louis XVI., who liked talking to her about her pictures, said one day—
“I know nothing about painting, but you make me like it.”
The last time Marie Antoinette ever sat to her was at Trianon, when she painted her head for the great picture in which the Queen is represented with her children, the first Dauphin, [20] Madame Royale, [21] and the Duc de Normandie, [22] which was hung in the Salon of 1788, and excited universal admiration. It was afterwards taken to Versailles and hung in one of the salons through which the Queen always passed on her way to mass.
After the death of her eldest boy, the sight of this picture so affected the Queen that she had it removed, taking care to explain to Mme. Le Brun that this was done only because she could not bear to see it, as it so vividly recalled the child whose loss was at that time such a terrible grief to her.
The days were rapidly approaching when she would be thankful that an early death had saved him from the fate of his brother.
In 1782 business took M. Le Brun to Flanders, and his wife, who had never travelled, was delighted to accompany him.