Fragonard Part 3

But the storm burst, and soon affairs became tragic red.

There came, for the ruin of the cause of a const.i.tutional monarchy and to end the last hope of the Court party, the unfortunate death of Mirabeau--the hesitations of the king--his foolish flight to Varennes--his arrest.

The const.i.tutional party in the Legislative a.s.sembly, at first dominant, became subordinate to the more violent but more able _Girondists_, with their extreme wing of _Jacobins_ under Robespierre, and _Cordeliers_ under Danton, Marat, Camille Desmoulins, and Fabre d'Eglantine. The proscription of all emigrants quickly followed. It was as unsafe to leave as to stay in Paris. The queen's insane enmity towards Lafayette finished the king's business. On the night of the 9th of August the dread tocsin sounded the note of doom to the royal cause--herald to the bloodshed of the morrow. Three days afterwards, the king and the royal family were prisoners in the Temple.

The National Convention met for the first time on the 21st of September 1792; decreed the First Year of the Republic, abolished Royalty and the t.i.tles of courtesy, decreed in their place _citoyen_ and _citoyenne_, and the use of _tu_ and _toi_ for _vous_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VIII.--LE BILLET DOUX

(In the Collection of M. Wildenstein, Paris)

Here we see Fragonard in his phase of sentimental recorder of love-scenes so typical of the art of Louis the Fifteenth's day.]

The National Convention also displayed the antagonism of the two wings of the now all-powerful Girondist party--the Girondists and the Jacobins or Montagnards. The conflict began with the quarrel as to whether the king could be tried. The 10th of January 1793 saw the king's head fall to the guillotine--the Jacobins had triumphed. War with Europe followed, and the deadly struggle between the Girondists and Jacobins for supreme power. The 27th of May 1793 witnessed the appointment of the terrible and secret Committee of Public Safety. By June the Girondists had wholly fallen. Charlotte Corday's stabbing of Marat in his bath left the way clear for Robespierre's ambition. The Jacobins in power, the year of the Reign of Terror began--July 1793 to July 1794--with Robespierre as the lord of the h.e.l.lish business. The scaffolds reeked with blood--from that of Marie Antoinette and Egalite Orleans to that of the Girondist deputies and Madame Roland, and the most insignificant beggar suspected of the vague charge of "hostility to the Republic." In a mad moment the Du Barry, who had shown the n.o.blest side of her character in befriending the old allies of her bygone days of greatness, published a notice of a theft from her house. It drew all eyes to her wealth. And she went to the guillotine shrieking with terror and betraying all who had protected her. Then came strife amongst the Jacobins. Robespierre and Danton fought the scoundrel Hebert for life, and overthrew him. The Hebertists went to the guillotine, dying in abject terror. Danton, with his appeals for cessation of the bloodshed of the Terror, alone stood between Robespierre and supreme power. Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Eglantine and their humane fellows, were sent to the guillotine. Between the 10th of June and the 27th of July, in 1794, fourteen hundred people in Paris alone died on the scaffold.

Fragonard dreaded to fly from the tempest. It was as safe to remain in Paris as to leave the city. Any day he might be taken. Sadness fell upon him and ate into his heart. The old artist could not look without uneasiness upon the ruin of the aristocracy, of the farmers-general, and of the gentle cla.s.s, now in exile or prison or under trial--his means of livelihood utterly gone. Without hate for Royalty or for the Republic, the artists, by birth plebeian and in manners bourgeois, many of them old men, could but blink with fearful eyes at the vast upheaval. Their art was completely put out of fashion--a new art, solemn and severe, cla.s.sical and heroic, was born. For half a century the charming art of France of the eighteenth century lay wholly buried--a thing of contempt wherever it showed above the ashes.

Fragonard's powerful young friend David, the painter, now stood sternly watchful over the old man's welfare; and David was at the height of his popularity--he was a member of the Convention. He took every opportunity to show his friendship publicly, visited Fragonard regularly, secured him his lodgings at the Louvre, brought about his election to the jury of the Arts created by the Convention to take the place of the Royal Academy.

But the old artist was bewildered.

The national enthusiasm was not in him. The artists were ruined by the destruction of their pensions. The buyers of Fragonard's pictures were dispersed, their power and their money gone, their favour dissipated.

Fragonard worked on without conviction or truth. The new school uprooted all his settled ideals. He struggled hard to catch the new ideas, and failed. He helped to plant a tree of liberty in the court of the Louvre, meditating the while how he could be gone from Paris--it was a tragic farce, played with his soul. The glories of the Revolution alarmed the old man. He saw the kinsfolk of his friends dragged off to the guillotine. He had guarded against suspicion and arrest by giving a certificate early in 1794, the year of the Terror, stating that he had no intention of emigrating, adding a statement of residence, and avowing his citizenship. He felt that even these acts were not enough protection in these terrible years. No man knew when or where the blow might fall--at what place or moment he might be seized, or on what charge, and sent to the guillotine. Friends were taken in the night. Hubert Robert was seized and flung into Saint Lazare, escaping death but by an accident. The state of misery and want amongst the artists and their wives and families at this time was pitiable.

Fragonard gladly s.n.a.t.c.hed at the invitation of an old friend of his family, Monsieur Maubert, to go to him at Gra.s.se during these anxious times of the travail that had come upon France.

Shortly after that Sunday in December when the Du Barry went shrieking to her hideous death at the guillotine, Fragonard, turning his face to the South of his birth, was rolling up amongst his baggage the four finished canvases of "The Romance of Love and Youth," and the unfinished fifth canvas, "Deserted," ordered and repudiated by the Du Barry. He bundled his family into a chaise, and lumbered out of Paris, rumbling on clattering wheels through the guards at the gates, and making southwards towards Provence for his friend's house at Gra.s.se. Here, far away from the din and strife, Fragonard set up his world-famous decorative panels in the salon of his host, which they admirably fitted, painting for the overdoors, "Love the Conqueror,"

"Love-folly," "Love pursuing a Dove," "Love embracing the Universe,"

and a panel over the fireplace, "Triumph of Love." He also painted during his stay the portraits of the brothers Maubert; and, to keep his host safe from ugly rumours and unfriendly eyes, he decorated the vestibule with revolutionary emblems, phrygian bonnet, axes and f.a.ggots, and the masks of Robespierre and the Abbe Gregoire, and the like trickings of red republicanism.... His host was the maternal grandfather of the Malvilan, at whose death in 1903, the room and its decorations were sold to an American collector for a huge sum of money.

Meanwhile, able and resolute men had determined that Robespierre and the Terror must end. Robespierre went to the guillotine. The Revolution of the Ninth Thermidor put an end to the Terror in July 1794.

All this time the armies of France were winning the respect of the world by their gallantry and skill. The 23rd of September 1795, saw France establish the Directory--the 5th of October, the Day of the Sections, saw the stiff fight about the Church of St. Roch, and Napoleon Bonaparte appointed second-in-command of the army. The young general was soon Commander-in-Chief. And France thenceforth advanced, spite of the many blunders of the Directory, with all the genius of her race, to the splendid recovery of her fortunes, and to a greatness which was to be the wonder and admiration and dread of the world.

The Revolution of the 18th and 19th of Brumaire (9th and 10th of November 1799) destroyed the Directory and set the people's idol, Napoleon Bonaparte, at the helm of her mighty state.

VI

THE END

To Paris Fragonard crept back, he and his family, to his old quarters at the Louvre, when Napoleon was come to power, and the guillotine was slaked with blood. He returned to Paris a poor old man.

The enthusiasm was gone out of his invention, the volition out of his hand's cunning, the breath out of his career. He was out of the fashion; a man risen from the dead. His efforts to catch the spirit of the time were pathetic. He painted rarely now. He won a pa.s.sing success with an historic canvas or so, done in the new manner. But what did Fragonard know of political allegories? what enthusiasm had he for the famous days of the Revolution? what were caricature or satire to him, any more than the heroic splendour of Greece and Rome?

The G.o.ds of elegance were dead; a severe and frigid morality stood upon their altars.

We have a pen-picture of the old painter at this time--short, big of head, stout, full-bodied, brisk, alert, ever gay; he has red cheeks, sparkling eyes, grey hair very much frizzed out; he is to be seen wandering about the Louvre dressed in a cloak or overcoat of a mixed grey cloth, without hooks or eyes or b.u.t.tons--a cloak which the old man, when he is at work, ties at the waist with it does not matter what--a piece of string, a crumpled chiffon. Every one loves "little father Fragonard." Through every shock of good and evil fortune he remains alert and cheerful. The old face smiles even through tears.

Thus, walking with aging step towards the end, he saw Napoleon created Emperor of the French, his triumphant career marred only at rare intervals by such disasters as Trafalgar--heard perhaps of the suicide of the unfortunate but gallant Villeneuve at the disgrace of trial by court-martial for this very loss of Trafalgar.

In the year of 1806, on the New Year's Day of which were abolished the Republican reckonings of the years as established at the Revolution, suddenly came the suppression of the artists' lodging at the Louvre by decree of the Emperor. The Fragonards went to live hard by in the house of the restaurant-keeper Very, in the Rue Grenelle Saint-Honore.

The move was for Fragonard but the prelude to a longer journey.

The old artist walks now more sluggishly than of old, his four-and-seventy years have taken the briskness out of his step.

Returning from the Champ de Mars on a sultry day in August he becomes heated--enters a cafe to eat an ice; congestion of the brain sets in.

At five of the clock in the morning of the 22nd day of August 1806, Fragonard enters into the eternal sleep--at the hour that his master Boucher had gone to sleep.

Thus pa.s.sed away the last of the great painters of France's gaiety and lightness of heart.

Madame Fragonard lived to be seventy-seven, dying in 1824. Marguerite Gerard had a happy career as an artist under the Empire and the Restoration, but never married--dying at seventy-six, loaded with honours and in comfortable circ.u.mstances in the year that Queen Victoria came to the throne of England. Thus peacefully ended the days of Fragonard and his immediate kin after the turmoil and fierce tragic years of the Terror.

Painting with prodigal hand a series of elegant masterpieces in a century that made elegance its G.o.d, Fragonard disappeared, neglected and well-nigh discredited for years, with Watteau and Boucher and Greuze for goodly company; but with them, he is come into his own again, lord of a very realm of beauty.

To understand the atmosphere of the France of the seventeen-hundreds before the Revolution it is necessary to understand the art of Watteau, of Boucher, of Fragonard, and of Chardin. Of its pictured romance, Watteau and Boucher and Fragonard hold the keys. To shut the book of these is to be blind to the revelation of the greater part of that romance. Watteau states the new France of light airs and gaiety and pleasant prospects, tinged with sweet melancholy, that became the dream of a France rid of the pomposity and mock-heroics of the Grand Monarque; Boucher fulfils the century; Fragonard utters its swan's note. The art of Fragonard embodies astoundingly the pulsing evening of a century of the life of France, uttering its gay blithe note, skimming over the dangerous deeps of its mighty significance, yet not wholly disregarding the deeps as did the art of his two great forerunners. His is the last word of that mock-heroic France that Louis the Fourteenth built on stately and pompous pretence; that Louis the Fifteenth still further corrupted by the worship of mere elegance; that Louis the Sixteenth sent to its grave--a suffering people out of which a real France arose, from mighty and awful travail, like a giant, and stood bestriding the world, a superb reality.