As soon as our guest of honor, the poet Le Brun-Pindare, sets foot in my apartment, it is off with his powdered wig, and we ladies fluff out the natural curls he has, close to his ears, and I even promise to produce a laurel wreath fit for a poet laureate to put on his head, for in my studio I have just painted the young prince Henry Lubomirski kneeling before a laurel bush with its crown of leaves on his head. That painting is called The Love of Glory.
Straightaway, this laurel crown is fetched for our poet, and I also send again to the apartment of the Comte de Parois, for he owns a large purple cloak, which completely transforms Pindare into the Greek Anacreon. When the Marquis de Cubières arrives, I dress him and he sends for his guitar, which I have Étienne gild so that the guitar becomes a golden lyre in less than ten minutes.
Of course I do not neglect to take care with the costumes of M. de Rivière, the brother of my brother’s wife, Suzanne, and also my famous guest Chaudet, the much-admired sculptor. We are finally about twelve or fifteen in number.
I do not have much time to spend on my own costume, but that does not matter because my dresses are always simple white tunics (some call them smocks), to which I add quickly a diaphanous veil and a circlet of flowers for my head.
But in preparing the costumes of my darling little Julie and her little friend Mlle de Bonneuil, I take the utmost care and delight. They both become exquisite, irresistible, delicate Greek sprites. Julie has a transparency about her that shows the clear sparkle of her intelligent and original spirit. It makes my heart ache to look at their perfect, childish beauty and softness. These children have a vulnerability that displays no awareness of its own innocence. Amidst all our artifice, I want to weep that such natural charm can exist, for a while, on this earth. I feel something of the confused delight that I wish will wash over the unsuspecting latecomers.
At half past nine, we are all so pleased with ourselves and so full of anticipation in regard to the effect we feel sure we will make on the latecomers that we take turns playing the role of someone who has just entered who suddenly beholds the Greek scene, a table surrounded by beautifully attired Greeks. One by one we each leave our seats, exit the room, and return, so that we may enjoy the original and picturesque effect made by the others who remain seated. When each spectator turns and beholds the tableau, his or her face is swept with wonder, even though we around the table have witnessed the same expression on previous spectators, several times in a row.
I observe, “This tableau vivant from classical times melds two of the art forms we all adore, that of painting and that of the theater, and, in addition, it partakes of real life as we are enjoying it in the moment.” They agree with my words, but it is difficult for mere words to convey how thrilling and fulfilling this charade already is for each participant.
At ten o’clock, as I have expected, knowing how meticulous the Comte de Vaudreuil is in all his appointments with me (even sending a note if he is to be late), we hear the carriage arrive. Quickly both doors to the dining room are thrown open, the visitors from ancient Greece assume their seats around the richly gleaming table loaded with Etruscan pottery, and we commence to sing Gluck’s chorus “Le dieu de Paphos et de Guide,” with M. de Cubières playing his lyre.
When the Comte de Vaudreuil and his companion enter, I see sheer astonishment such as not in all my life have I ever experienced before. For a moment I fear Vaudreuil will lose his wits. He even wipes the back of his wrist across his eyes, such as my brother used to do, very young, when he awoke. I am fulfilled to have evoked such amazement, disbelief, and pleasure on the face of any human. Vaudreuil is lighted with delight, from within.
WHEN I PAINT JULIE and me together again, Julie is two years older, and I am seated, and she has just run to hug me. My arms protect her, in the portrait, but my hand clasps my own wrist, with her inside my arms. It is 1789, a year for historians, if not history painters: people say it is the year of the French Revolution. Julie and I are going to leave not only Paris, but all of France, with her governess. In this painting Self-Portrait, Holding My Daughter in My Arms I am completing the circle with myself, which includes her.
She is embracing me as much as I am embracing her, but we are each thinking our own thoughts, and they are quite different. Now Julie’s mind is beginning to be her own. I am wearing a loose, flowing gown in the Greek style, a reminder of that wonderful, spontaneous, very inexpensive party à la grecque I gave for my friends. My shoulder and part of my back are bare, vulnerable, and real.
My face and my body say hopefully, almost shyly, to the world, “This is my beloved child; be tender with her.”
Though our departure from revolutionary France is imminent, I try to make it appear that all is normal. I set up my easels with some unfinished work, the better to create the illusion that I am resigned to remaining in Paris. These unfinished portraits for which I have received commissions I regard with regret. M. Le Brun has already spent the amounts I received as retainers.
M. Le Brun has given me a small purse, and we have agreed I am to leave Paris with only eighty Louis, though I have earned for him millions by this time. In order to protect his business as an art dealer (especially the extensive holdings of valuable paintings by eminent artists), my husband has affirmed again his decision to remain in Paris. Being aware now of the increasing lawlessness of the populace, I doubt that he will be able to protect his holdings, but I admire the courage and tenacity represented by his decision. We each decide our own fate.
WHEN THE TIME FOR DEPARTURE grows near, Paris is seething with a special unrest. In gestures quite unusual for them, citizens arrange their rags carefully over their shoulders as though they were dressing up with rich scarves; they congregate and gossip to an extraordinary extent, exciting themselves, drinking to excess, cursing, spitting, raising their skirts and shamelessly relieving themselves publicly rather than absenting themselves for even a moment from their particular companions and their discourse. With impunity, men steal not only food but also hats and shoes and even chests from shops, and then fill the chests with other booty. They shake their fists under one another’s noses. It is as though the winds of change are winding themselves up for an explosion of destructive energy.
As night falls, a tattered mass begin to move as a unit toward the southwest. I am baffled by this movement, as though all the bees are senselessly leaving the hive together, till one of my servants explains their purpose to me. The mob is marching to the Château de Versailles to confront the queen and king. Faster and faster, they pour through the streets of Paris, like a hemorrhage, toward Versailles.
Stunned by acute anxiety for my royal friends, I stand at the window and watch the dregs of society leaving Paris all through the afternoon and evening. During the dark of night, I pull a chair to the window facing southwest, half expecting to see the glow of flames, but there is none. I try to focus on the brave flicker of a nearby streetlight. Earlier the lamplighter ignited the little flame with his long wand, then threw his tool down on the pavement and, with a swagger and a glance at me, joined the marchers. Eventually I doze in my hard chair, with my cheek propped up by my hand.
After dawn, the cry of a rooster wakes me; dazed and full of sorrow, I stir in my chair. As soon as I open my eyes I begin to witness a flow in the opposite direction of individuals and groups walking from the southwest. The number of pedestrians grows, and they walk closer and closer together till finally I am looking through my window at a mass of moving shoulders and heads, their legs and feet being completely concealed. The faces of the mob present a tapestry of emotion. Some appear jubilant and wild-eyed; others look sullen and satisfied, and some seem frightened and breathless. Coming toward me in the distance is a coach drawn by multiple horses, and I realize the mob is its vanguard.
The market women and shopkeepers of Paris have surrounded the coach bearing our monarchs, but they are not the only escort. The carriage drawn by six matched horses is preceded by severed heads mounted on long wooden pikes
, heads severed from the necks of two members of the royal Swiss Guard, for a hat has been placed atop one’s head. The two severed heads, gory and ghastly to behold, present two quite different responses to the calamity that has claimed these once living humans. The eyes of the one wearing the hat of the Swiss Guard are closed serenely, and his calm head moves through the air with a certain still dignity. The other head stares with wide eyes, the gaze fixed in horror and disbelief. His hair is loose. Waved back and forth in arcs atop its pike, from this head I watch a single brownish drop of blood sling free and fall downward toward the paving.
A bystander holding his member in his hand pisses into the moving spokes of the carriage wheels. Some of the mob have smeared blood across their foreheads in a mockery of the rites of Ash Wednesday. The coach draws ever closer, and I can see inside, for the curtains have not been drawn.
Inside, my lovely queen has turned to stone. Her face is still and calm, framed by the carriage window. It is as though she has been painted for the eons in tints delicate and subtle in great contrast to the coarse garb and faces surrounding her. Her skin like porcelain, her bearing calm, somber, and proud, she seems to have come from the moon or some other celestial body.
Instinctively, I reach out my hand toward her, but of course it cannot enter the world of a painting, of illusion. Inside my home, my fingertips encounter the window glass, cold to the touch, and my hand falls helplessly to my side. By slow degrees, the imprisoning carriage passes, and I also glimpse the king and the children of France within.
At the back of the magnificent carriage ride two footmen, their finery splattered with mud. Someone grabs the leg of one of them and pulls him crashing down into the street. I turn my head. To think, how easily with a push or the jerking of a leg, one can be brought low. Discarded.
For a moment my mind registers only blankness, for I have closed my eyes and almost lost consciousness, but the sensation of the fingering of the fabric of my own skirt restores me to reality. Too fine, too fine, my fingers tell me, and then my mind recalls that I have already taken the precaution of preparing the dress of a commoner for myself and for little Julie as well. Like commoners, we will sit safely inside a common stagecoach, not a private coach, I reassure myself. Yes, I know the means of escape, and I have a talent for acting.
Far ahead now, beyond my vision, the queen, my friend, in the noble carriage (I recognized the cage immediately as a borrowed one, belonging actually to a certain marquise) is being conveyed, I feel sure, toward imprisonment, perhaps death. Before me limp the wretched of the earth: exhausted, starving, dirty, chilled to the bone but with a terrible victory in their bloodshot eyes. Persistent but intermittent gunfire echoes in the distance; however, I have become so used to the sound that I scarcely remark it. Much more frightening is the low growl that rises from the streets without ceasing.
TODAY WE LEAVE. I am glad that I have already bidden farewell to Mlle Boquet, with whom I learned to paint when we were quite young, now Mme Filleul. I have tried to tell her of the images of the horror to come that have appeared so vividly in my imagination, how terrible visions blot out the visage of anyone who sits or stands before me, posing for a portrait. I have seen these visitors sitting patiently beyond my easel as being washed in blood. I believe in these involuntary visions. The visions are so vivid, they must be prophetic—though I would not blaspheme. During my visit I tried to warn her, my oldest friend.
Mme Filleul said to me, “You shouldn’t leave, my dear friend. You are making a mistake. I am going to stay because I believe in the happiness the Revolution is going to bring to us.”
X
LOUVECIENNES
or, An Old Woman Among Spring Trees
PORTRAIT
IMUST LET THESE OLD EYES look about and be grateful for the air and light. That I survived. And yet survive. My woods are full of violets, and honeysuckle will soon bloom. This is the true countryside—sweet scented, for I have trod on chamomile—beloved by all who believe that God’s love is present in the awakening of the earth. For many years now, the simple sight of a child is like looking at spring for me, and I am overcome with joy at the replenishing of life. Without turning to allegory, no painting can really capture the joy of nature I see about me in this green-blue moment. Occasionally there is a breeze that causes the light to flicker. Ah, I can render a dappled shade with my brush, but to make light flicker—that is beyond me.
My last image of the queen in life is the one framed by the carriage window, her beautiful face like a mask of tragedy; the surrounding mob; their awful emblem of liberty being two severed human heads hoisted high on pikes.
Not that last image—tightly, tightly I squeeze shut my actual eyes though it is the mind’s eye that unveils that horror. Not that, Memory! Instead, let us conjure up Marly-le-Roi, as it was then, a tranquil and serene place, nature’s own rustic fairyland. But after my return, after the Revolution, I visited there. I know that Marly-le-Roi has been reduced to rubble.
Here at Louveciennes, nature has a wildness about her, and my trees have not achieved the grandeur of those at Marly, nor are we so parklike here; in my old age, I find that disorder and unbounded nature also have their attractions. I have hung a shard of broken mirror on the trunk of a chestnut tree. Or, rather, I have had a servant do so. When I want to see my visage framed in fronds of pale spring green, I look into this mirror fragment. It once hung whole, at Versailles, I’ve been told.
I wish that simply for my own pleasure, I might have painted that meeting at Marly-le-Roi of my mother and myself with the queen and her ladies all in white, but I would have moved the location slightly to include those serene and gracious trees beside the lake in the background, for the trees, like people, leaned toward each other, in congregation. Perhaps I would catch something of the dappled shade falling on our faces and dresses in the painting. It need not be too large; indeed, I want its size to suggest intimacy. The painting would be a window, a peephole, on a time and place, seen from a distance.
It would be like catching a cloud. Or, I could paint myself as I am in this moment: an old woman, with something of her former beauty still recognizable in her face, standing beside a chestnut tree in the wood at Louveciennes. I step forward, reach out, and now my hand cups a low-growing branch full of blossoms. The arrangement of the flowers suggests a chandelier descended from its ceiling and a woman cradling the panicle of blossoms in her left hand, as I do now. (After all, my right hand must hold the brush, but my right hand has often painted my left one.)
An Old Woman Among Spring Trees: she is gazing to the side, at the natural chandelier, not at all at the artist. She is quite unaware that she is the subject of a painting. The skin of her hand is somewhat curdled because she is old, but I would paint it so that the hand itself looks rather like a cluster of small blossoms.
Why not? A metamorphosis, such as Bernini sculpted for Diana when she was so hotly pursued by Apollo. I suppose my pursuer is Father Time, with his sickle and hourglass.
I walk on in the woods of Louveciennes, carefully but without anxiety, for I have a very good history of circumventing personal accident or even overt danger. As I take a step or two on the mossy path, I watch the sway of my skirt and how my toes nudge out from beneath the hem as I walk. I am wearing lavender shoes today. I would prefer to be wearing no shoes at all at the hour of my death. To travel its mortal path, the spirit need not be shod.
What does enchantment mean but to be relieved of the ordinary and the less-than-pleasing by something delightfully surprising? To be free to be oneself.
Chairs, like stations (stations of opportunity and pleasure), are placed about in my woods, should I want to sit. To rest or to paint or sketch. Some of the wooden chairs have grown moss on their arms. I will be happy to see them again, my friends the chairs.
Habit is like a smooth stone, a keepsake, in the pocket, delightful to the touch. It comforts.
My fingers find their way into my hair now, as though they were searchin
g for something hidden there. No, it is to touch my scalp and the hard, curved bone beneath and the brain and mind beyond. I am trying to touch my own essence. To understand. To accept. To find the unity of self that needs to be apprehended before my own passing from the sunshine occurs. How I do love and have loved the light! The simple light. I think it is the darkness of the grave that is the most oppressive thought about death.
I remove my hand from the tree and smile at the reality around me.
The sky has darkened to a more mature blue, as the day ages. What a fine thing is a day! Its journey mimics the dawn and the dusk of our lives before the night. I have always loved the night and appreciated the respite it gives my eye from the constant stimulation of color, but oh how glad I am in the morning. Every morning I awake to exclaim, Alive! I am yet alive, and here is the world, my home, waiting for me. But where have I been at night? My eyes closed, my brain shut up in the cave of the skull? Is the night a round, dark portal to death? How can I fear it?
I have seen so many die too soon, their lives not yet lived. That will not be my fate.
WHEN MY NIECES COME TO SEE ME this evening, I will feel almost as happy—not quite, it is quite a different satisfaction—as when I was their ages. Still I relish the froth of social life. I cannot regret too much my connection to M. Le Brun, for it is through him that I know Eugénie Le Brun (now Mme J. Tripier Le Franc), whom I have guided in the art of portrait painting. From that ancestor Charles Le Brun, who decorated Versailles for Louis XIV, she has inherited more of the artist’s hand and eye than ever did my husband, her uncle, though that blood did make my M. Le Brun (let me credit him again) an insightful connoisseur and art dealer.
My dear niece and student Eugénie is a success, admired for her likenesses and the delicacy and precision of her line. Some of that delicacy she learned from me, for it is a characteristic that can be taught and acquired. They speak of the richness of her colors; I did not try to influence her palette, for those choices must come from within the soul. In my best work, I use a palette close to that of Van Dyke. I like clarity and brightness. It is not so much richness through color that I would aspire to capture but joy, life itself, the brightness that light discovers. The very brightness of brightness.