Gérard was created the perfect opposite, both physically and morally, of David. David was tall, with distorted features, rough, furious, cruel. Gérard was small, with a pleasing, regular physiognomy, delicate, soft, generous.... He would often tell how he was forced in those days (during the reign of terror) to deceive his master David, in order to preserve his own life. David, who in his zeal for reforming the world had become one of the most active members of the Committee of Safety, was incessantly busied in providing that bloody tribunal with familiars. Every one belonging to him, who desired his own preservation, was forced either to adopt republicanism in David's sense, or to evade it by some kind of deception. Gérard, although in perfect health, escaped the honor designed him by feigning sickness; and went about in public on crutches, which, however, he threw down the instant he knew himself safe from observation. Gérard's mother had died in 1792. Her brother, the painter's uncle, now a grown youth, took up the queer fancy of showing the Parisians the excellent manner in which the Romans are skilled in making confectioner's ices. The success of the Café Tortoni, on the Boulevard des Italiens, has now been for some fifty years known to all Europe. One of the children (Gérard) was dead, the youngest provided for elsewhere; and thus, after his mother's death, the young painter of two-and-twenty was left alone with his aunt, Mlle. Tortoni, who was but two years his junior. She became his wife. When relating the above, she would add, with naïveté, "At that time my nephew was in a manner forced to marry me, unless he chose to turn me out into the street. We were poor, but contented. Gérard's talent, as yet little known, and destitute of suitable means for its exercise, supported us, however, barely; and I continued to sew, darn, cook, carry water, and cut wood for our little household, as I had been wont to do before, when assisting his mother, my sister. In those days there was no marrying in the church, no priest, no banns. A few days after the death of my sister, we appeared in our poor work-a-day clothes, before the maire. He joined our hands, and then we became a couple."

Some months were passed in this obscure poverty, until calmer times prevailed in Paris. Isabey had somehow become aware of the young painter's talent, and now urged him to exhibit a picture at the first Exhibition. Gérard produced the sketch of his Bélisaire;[5] but declared he had no means to paint it on a grand scale. Isabey hereupon assisted him; and, after the picture was finished and exhibited with success, procured him a purchaser, at the price of 100 Louis d'or.

"On the receipt of this sum," Madame Gérard went on, "we were nearly losing our wits for joy. We were ravished, like mere children, by the glitter of the shining gold, which we kept again and again rolling through our fingers. We, who until now could not even afford to buy a common candlestick, so that we had to cut a hole in our poor wooden table to stick the rushlight in,—we now had a hundred louis!" By degrees Gérard advanced to a high European name; but those only who knew him personally could have any idea of his amiable, refined nature, of his pleasant conversation, of the various acquirements and highly intellectual peculiarities of this eminent man, who took up with equal clearness many of the most dissimilar sciences. You forgot time with him, or gladly gave him up the whole night, as he seldom made his appearance in company at his own house before ten.

Before leaving the grim figure of the old Revolution for more modern sketches, we must correct the lady's statement of its victims, in which she quite exceeds the utmost latitude of feminine gossip. "Two millions of heads" she assigns as the food of the devouring guillotine—a number transcendent, even for lady rhetoric. It is some five hundred times more than the largest estimate of those even who have done their best to aggravate the tale of its horrors. The Convention, when grown Anti-Jacobin, and anxious, of course, to justify its destruction of Robespierre and his fellows, it published lists of the sufferers, could not bring the number of the guillotined up to a full two thousand. Montgaillard, who complains that the returns were incomplete, may be taken as the author of the most extreme calculation on this subject: he does not get beyond a total of four thousand victims, including those who perished by fusillades and noyades. Even an anonymous lady cannot be suffered to pass with such a terrific exaggeration unquestioned. In 1823, she was present at an opening of the Chambers by "Louis the Desired," now grown fatter, it seems, than was desirable for such an operation. Indeed—

he could no longer walk; on this account the session was held in the Louvre; and the manner in which he suddenly pushed out on his low rolling chair, from beneath a curtain, which was quickly drawn back, as it is done on the stage, and as rapidly closed again, had an effect at once painful and ludicrous. Both these feelings were increased by the shrill piping treble which came squeaking forth from this unlucky corpulent body.... His brother, the Comte d'Artois, afterwards Charles the Tenth, was tall and thin, and had retained to his advanced age that habit of shuffling about with his legs, which teachers and governors had vainly tried to cure him of while young. He could not keep his body still for a single instant. His protruded head, his mouth always open, would of themselves have seemed to indicate mere stupidity rather than cunning, had not this impression been contradicted, partly by the vivacity of his eyes, and partly by his too notorious habit of intriguing. This idiotic air of poking forward the head, with the mouth always open—but aggravated by quite lifeless and almost totally closed eyes—was apparent in a still higher degree in his eldest son, the Duke of Angoulême. In the face of his wife there were still visible some traces, if not of a former beauty, at least of something characteristic and noble. In spite of her withered, lean figure, her gait was firm and majestic; but the terrorists of the Revolution had heaped misery of every kind in double and three-fold measure on this unhappy daughter of Louis the Sixteenth, and their cannibal severity had broken her heart for ever.... The Duchess of Berri, a Neapolitan princess, wife of the youngest son of the Count d'Artois, was young, but had been ill-treated by nature in her outward appearance. She was short, thin, with hair blonde almost to whiteness, and a kind of reddish fairness of complexion. In her irregular features, in her eyes which all but squinted, no kind of expression could be detected—not even that of frivolity, which she was accused of.... To both these ladies the rigorously-prescribed court-dress, as worn in open day, without candlelight, was very unbecoming. It consisted of a short white satin dress, called jupe, which means a dress without a train; the front breadth richly embroidered with gold, with a cut-out body, and short sleeves, leaving the neck and arms bare,—the effect of which was absolutely pitiable on the superannuated, yellow, and withered Duchess of Angoulême. Around the waist a golden ceinture held up a colored velvet skirt, with an enormous train, but no body. In front, this kind of outer dress, called manteau de cour, was open, and trimmed all round with broad lace. The head was decorated, or rather disfigured, by a thick upright plume of tall white ostrich feathers, to which were attached behind two long ends of blonde lace, called barbes, which hung down the back. On the forehead a closely-fitting jewelled diadem was worn, and diamond ornaments on the neck and arms, according to the usual fashion.

From such court scarecrows let us turn to keep a last corner for a figure of more modern and genial appearance—though this, too, was saddening, and is now, like the rest, grown a mere shadow. The lady saw much of the musician Chopin after 1832, and speaks of him with warm affection, and with a fine feeling of his genius:—

He was a delicate, graceful figure, in the highest degree attractive—the whole man a mere breath—rather a spiritual than a bodily substance,—all harmony, like his playing. His way of speaking, too, was like the character of his art—soft, fluctuating, murmuring. The son of a French father and of a Polish mother, in him the Romance and Sclavonic dialects were combined, as it were, in one perfect harmony. He seemed, indeed, hardly to touch the piano; you might have fancied he would do quite as well without as with the instrument: you thought no more of the mechanism,—but listened to flute-like murmurs, and dreamed of hearing Æolian harps stirred by the ethereal breathings of the wind; and with all this—in his whole wide sphere of talents given to him alone—always obliging, modest, unexacting! He was no pianoforte player of the modern sort: he had fashioned his art quite alone in his own way, and it was something indescribable. In private rooms as well as in concerts, he would steal quietly, unaffectedly, to the piano; was content with any kind of seat; showed at once, by his simple dress and natural demeanor, that he abhorred every kind of grimace and quackery; and began, without any prelude, his performance. How feeling it was—how full of soul!... When I first knew him, though far from strong, he still enjoyed good health; he was very gay, even satirical, but always with moderation and good taste. He possessed an inconceivable comic gift of mimicry, and in private circles of friends he diffused the utmost cheerfulness both by his genius and his good spirits.... Hallé has now the best tradition of his manner.

We pause, not for want of matter, but for want of room. Besides its lively sketches, the book contains some materials of a tragic interest—to which we may return.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] It is now, or was not long since, at Munich, in the Leuchtenburg Gallery.