rough.

The two families soon became intimate. Le Brun carefully weighing the
great advantages that such a union could bring to him, but entangled by
his engagement to marry the daughter of a Dutch dealer in pictures who
lived opposite to him, and with whom he had considerable business in
works of art, beat about as to how he could marry Elizabeth Vigee. The
girl was living in the splendour of a circle to which her family could
not hope to aspire; the picture-dealer belonged to the middle-class in
which her own family moved. Any day she might marry out of that
middle-class world into the world of fashion. He saw that the girl
moved in, and was happiest in, a great world to which he had not the
key. He had the ambition to belong to that world, though his
common-sense might have told him that he never could do more than hang
about its outer courts. He was a calculating blackguard, a man of
loose life, and a vulgar fellow with vulgar ambitions. He saw astutely
enough that this girl was well on the high-road to considerable
fortune. The Dutch girl opposite necessitated wary walking. He played
the romantic lover, and before six months were run out he was pressing
his suit, asking Elizabeth Vigee to marry him secretly.

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PLATE IV.--PORTRAIT OF MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN

(In the National Gallery, London)

She saw at Anvers the famous "Chapeau de paille" by Rubens. This
canvas by Rubens clearly inspired her to the painting of the portrait
of herself in a straw hat, where she stands bathed in the sunlight, her
palette in her hand. The painting of the flesh of the pretty face is
exquisite, and in spite of intense finish is broadly conceived and rich
and glowing in colour. The clumsy drawing of the hand that holds the
palette is the only defect in this, one of her masterpieces. The
picture has the added interest of revealing to us how Vigee Le Brun set
her palette. The thing is thrilling with life; and the little feminine
conceit of wearing her black wrap is quaintly delightful.

[Illustration: Plate IV.]

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The girl seems to have had a presentiment of the misery that such a
marriage would mean for her. After long and serious hesitation she
gave her consent. It was perhaps due to a sense of being between the
devil and the deep sea, for her sordid and miserly stepfather the
j