“Have you no friend to accompany you?”
“I have no one with me,” replied she, “but my daughter and her governess.”
“Oh, well!” said the Countess, “you must anyhow appear to have somebody; I will lend you M. Denon all the time you are here; he will give you his arm, I will take somebody else’s arm, and people will think I have quarrelled with him, for you can’t go about here without un ami.”
E. H. Bearne
VENICE
The arrangement proved entirely satisfactory. Lisette went about all day with M. Denon, in gondolas, and to see everything—churches, pictures, palaces; every one who knows Venice even now, knows it as a place of enchantment, unlike anything else on earth; and in those days the Doge still reigned, modern desecrations and eyesores were not, and the beauty of the life and surroundings of the Queen of the Adriatic was supreme.
Lisette frequented chiefly the society of the Spanish Ambassadress, with whom she went to the Opera at the far-famed Fenice, and finally left Venice and went by Padova, Vicenza, and Verona to Turin, where she had letters of introduction from Mesdames to the Queen, whose portrait they wished her to paint for them.
In former years, before the marriage of the Queen, Mme. Le Brun had seen her, as a very young girl, at the court of her grandfather, Louis XV., when she was so fat that she was called le gros Madame. She was now pale and thin, whether from the austerities of devotion she now practised, or from her grief at the misfortunes of her family and anxiety for her sister, Madame Elizabeth, and her eldest brother, the King of France.
She would not have her portrait done, saying that she was very sorry to refuse her aunts, but as she had renounced the world she could not have her picture taken. She had cut her hair short and her dress was very simple. The King looked nearly as pale and thin.