At a State ball she first saw again the Empress, Marie Thérèse, daughter of the Queen of Naples, whom she found much changed in appearance. She had painted her portrait in 1792.
She also was overjoyed to meet the Comtesse de Brionne, Princesse de Lorraine, one of the earliest friends who had shown her unvarying kindness at the beginning of her career—and she resumed her old habit of going often to supper with her. The Polignac, too, had a place near Vienna, in fact, wherever she went Lisette met numbers of her unfortunate countrymen and acquaintance driven into exile, watching in despair the course of events in France.
She scarcely dared read the newspapers, since one day on opening one she had seen in the death list the names of nine persons of her acquaintance; and all her Austrian friends tried to prevent her from hearing or knowing what was going on. A letter from her brother, however, brought her the fatal news of the murder of the King and Queen.
She was as happy at Vienna as she could be anywhere under the circumstances. During the winter she had the most brilliant society in Europe, and for the summer she had taken a little house at Schönbrunn, near the Polignac, in a lovely situation, to which she always retired when Vienna became too hot, and where she took long solitary walks by the Danube, or sat and sketched under the trees.
Here she finished the portrait of the young Princess von Lichtenstein, as Iris. As she was represented with bare feet, her husband told Mme. Le Brun that when it was hung in his gallery, and the heads of the family came to see it, they were all extremely scandalised, so he had placed a pair of little shoes on the ground under it, and told the grand-parents they had dropped off.
FOOTNOTES:
[39] The eldest married the Emperor Francis II., the second the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
[40] Madame Clotilde, eldest daughter of the Dauphin, son of Louis XV., married the King of Sardinia.
[41] The coachman of Europe.