, or as she herself wrote it
across the title-page of her _Souvenirs_, Louise Elizabeth Vigee. Into
her little fingers Destiny set the skill that had been denied to her
father; the flame was given to her. And by the whimsy of things, there
was also born in far-away Vienna, in this same year of 1755, in the
palace of the Emperors of Austria, a little princess whom they
christened Marie Antoinette; who was to marry the little seven-month
old princeling that lay sucking his thumb in the Royal palace near by,
and thereby to become future Queen of France.

Like Francois Boucher, the great painter to the king, Elizabeth Vigee
came to the pretty business with the advantage of being an artist's
child; like him, she received her first lessons at an early age from
her father; and, like him, she moved from earliest childhood in an
atmosphere of art and artists.

From her father she inherited a talent and taste for art, an amiable
temper, a gift of wit; from her mother, a very handsome woman, she was
dowered with a beauty for which she was as remarkable, and to which her
many portraits of herself bear abundant witness. From very childhood
she began to display the proofs of her inheritance--that happy
disposition and that charm of manner that were to make her one of the
most winsome personalities of her time. At the convent to which her
parents sent her in her tenth year she fell to drawing on the margins
of her books, filling them with little portrait-heads--an incessant
habit that set her teachers grumbling at her lack of respect towards
grammar and history. But to her delighted father the grumbles were
matter for laughter; in him she found an ally who was hugely proud to
discover in his girl an inheritor of his gifts. It is told of the fond
father that the girl having taken to him one day a drawing, Vigee cried
out exultantly: "You will be a painter, my girl, or there never was
one!"

Brought up, as the child was, in the world of artists, with the aims
and ambitions and enthusiasms of artists for her very breath, she could
not fail to find in such a world, besides the encouragement which was
prodigally bestowed upon so young and promising a talent, the teaching
needful to develop her powers. Amongst the artists who were on
friendly terms with the girl's father, and of whom Doyen was the most
intimate, was Davesne, a member and deputy professor of the Academy of
St. Luke--he who afterwards claimed to have taught the litt