le Elizabeth
the elements of painting. Davesne's lessons were at best but few, and
seem to have been limited to showing the eager child how to set a
palette. The girl was in fact picking up the crumbs that fell from
many tables; at any rate she showed astoundingly precocious industry
and gifts, and was soon making quite a stir amongst the painter-folk,
and becoming a source of pride to her father.

Vigee, however, was only destined to guide and encourage the child
towards the path; he died on the 9th of May 1768 from swallowing a fish
bone. Little Elizabeth was but thirteen years old when this first
great grief fell upon her.

That was a strange world in which the child stood bewildered at the
baffling cruelty of human destiny--this eighteenth-century France. The
Pompadour had died in the child's ninth year; her dogged and persistent
enemy, the Dauphin, the year after her; the neglected queen now
followed the Pompadour to the grave in the June of this same year that
left little Elizabeth fatherless.

Under the scandals of the Court, and the tyranny and corruption of the
nobility and clergy, the French people were no longer concealing their
distress under courtly phrases, nor groaning in secret. The ideas of
the new philosophers were penetrating and colouring public opinion.
They were beginning to talk of the great antique days of Greece, of
heroes, and of virtue, and of living and dying like Romans. Fickle
fashion was turning her back upon the art of old Boucher, and upon
Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses and pleasant landscapes and bosky
groves, and was taking up her abode with heroes and amongst picturesque
ruins. The Parliament men were demanding rights, were indeed going to
prison and into banishment for those rights; nay, was not Choiseul the
great minister of France; and Choiseul's power was deep planted in the
rights of the people and founded on Parliaments. All France was
watching for the dawn of liberty.

II

THE WONDERFUL CHILD

The thirteen-year-old child suffered a grief so poignant at the loss of
her father, to whom she had been passionately attached, that it
threatened to have the gravest consequences on her future; had it not
been for her father's old friend Doyen, who, transferring to the girl
the deep affection he had had for the dead man, urged the child to take
up her brushes again--for she was already painting from Nature.

It was now that she entered the studio of Gabriel Br