eweller must have been a sorry table-companion of her home life. If
she suspected the picture-dealer to be a rogue, she thought, likely
enough, that the more genial rogue would be a pleasanter fellow to live
with than the other.

She married him secretly on the 11th of January 1776, on the edge of
her twenty-first year. It was not a wholly promising beginning, this
that gave her the name that she was to immortalise--Vigee Le Brun.

It was a sorry match. It began in secrecy; she was to discover that it
was founded on a treachery. When the marriage was discovered it was
too late to dissuade the girl from it; she had to listen to some plain
home-truths as a Dutchman saw them, and to grim prophecies of the evil
that would come of the business. But he might have spared his breath.

She was to have her ugly awakening. She early discovered that Le Brun
was a gambler, a rake, and a thoroughly dissolute and unscrupulous
rogue. It was not long before he had not only squandered his own
fortune, but was playing ducks and drakes with every penny that she
gained by her art and her untiring industry.

She was soon to become a mother; the love that she had sedately allowed
to go out to her disreputable and pretentious husband, and which she
had early withdrawn in tatters, she now lavished upon this, her
girl-child.

Meanwhile, her reputation increased by leaps and bounds. Her studio
was simply besieged by "the Quality." The Duchess of Orleans had to
wait her turn a whole year before she could be painted. Vigee Le
Brun's praise was in every mouth. She was sung in prose and verse; the
poetasters ran to much doggerel of handsome intent, as was the fashion
of the day. Marquises and the rest of the scribbling folk tripped over
halting feet to sing her charms and immortalise her art. "L'orgueil de
France" rhymed it to "la double puissance;" and "immortal crayon" to
"admiration." They spilled the rosy inks. Le Brun, not the
picture-dealing husband, but the poetical fellow who modestly nicknamed
himself the Pindar of his age, plucked at the lyre with both hands in
her honour.

Nay, have we not the written record that Laharpe, uttering his rhymed
discourse on the genius of women to a great gathering of the bloods and
wits at the Academy, and bursting into violent poesies in announcing
that Elizabeth, "the modern Rosalba, but more brilliant than she, weds
the voice of Favart with the smiles of a Venus"--every one rose to
th