The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Memoirs of Madame Vigee Lebrun, by
Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun

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Title: The Memoirs of Madame Vigee Lebrun

Author: Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun

Translator: Lionel Strachey

Release Date: April 10, 2010 [EBook #31934]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MEMOIRS OF MADAME VIGEE LEBRUN ***

Produced by Adam Buchbinder and the Online Distributed
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from the Google Print project.)

Memoirs of Madame Vigee Lebrun

Uniform with this volume:

MEMOIRS OF COUNTESS POTOCKA
_Illustrated._ Translated by Lionel Strachey

MEMOIRS OF A CONTEMPORARY
_Illustrated._ Translated by Lionel Strachey

[Illustration: MME. VIGEE LEBRUN AND HER DAUGHTER.]

Memoirs of Madame Vigee Lebrun

Translated by Lionel Strachey

With Numerous Reproductions of Paintings by the Authoress

London
Grant Richards
1904

Copyright, 1903, by
Doubleday, Page & Company

Printed by Manhattan Press
New York. N. Y., U. S. A.

PREFATORY NOTE

Madame Lebrun brought out her Memoirs at the suggestion of her friend,
the Princess Dolgoruki, in 1835. The authoress was born in 1756, at
Paris, where she died in 1842. She was the daughter of Louis Vigee, an
obscure portrait painter. Her baptismal name was Marie Louise
Elisabeth. In 1776 Mademoiselle Vigee was married to Jean Baptiste
Pierre Lebrun, a notable picture dealer and critic, known also to his
contemporaries as an inveterate gambler.

This book forms a rendering of Madame Carette's edition of the Lebrun
Memoirs, slightly abridged for the sake of uniformity with the
"Memoirs of the Countess Potocka" and the "Memoirs of a Contemporary,"
issuing from the same hands as the present volume.

CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER I. YOUTH.

Precocious Talents Manifested -- Mlle. Vigee's Father and
Mother -- Death of Her Father -- A Friend of Her Girlhood --
Her Mother Rema