Part 3 (2/2)

The Revolution of the 18th and 19th of Brumaire (9th and 10th of November 1799) destroyed the Directory and set the people's idol, Napoleon Bonaparte, at the helm of her mighty state.

VI

THE END

To Paris Fragonard crept back, he and his family, to his old quarters at the Louvre, when Napoleon was come to power, and the guillotine was slaked with blood. He returned to Paris a poor old man.

The enthusiasm was gone out of his invention, the volition out of his hand's cunning, the breath out of his career. He was out of the fas.h.i.+on; a man risen from the dead. His efforts to catch the spirit of the time were pathetic. He painted rarely now. He won a pa.s.sing success with an historic canvas or so, done in the new manner. But what did Fragonard know of political allegories? what enthusiasm had he for the famous days of the Revolution? what were caricature or satire to him, any more than the heroic splendour of Greece and Rome?

The G.o.ds of elegance were dead; a severe and frigid morality stood upon their altars.

We have a pen-picture of the old painter at this time--short, big of head, stout, full-bodied, brisk, alert, ever gay; he has red cheeks, sparkling eyes, grey hair very much frizzed out; he is to be seen wandering about the Louvre dressed in a cloak or overcoat of a mixed grey cloth, without hooks or eyes or b.u.t.tons--a cloak which the old man, when he is at work, ties at the waist with it does not matter what--a piece of string, a crumpled chiffon. Every one loves ”little father Fragonard.” Through every shock of good and evil fortune he remains alert and cheerful. The old face smiles even through tears.

Thus, walking with aging step towards the end, he saw Napoleon created Emperor of the French, his triumphant career marred only at rare intervals by such disasters as Trafalgar--heard perhaps of the suicide of the unfortunate but gallant Villeneuve at the disgrace of trial by court-martial for this very loss of Trafalgar.

In the year of 1806, on the New Year's Day of which were abolished the Republican reckonings of the years as established at the Revolution, suddenly came the suppression of the artists' lodging at the Louvre by decree of the Emperor. The Fragonards went to live hard by in the house of the restaurant-keeper Very, in the Rue Grenelle Saint-Honore.

The move was for Fragonard but the prelude to a longer journey.

The old artist walks now more sluggishly than of old, his four-and-seventy years have taken the briskness out of his step.

Returning from the Champ de Mars on a sultry day in August he becomes heated--enters a cafe to eat an ice; congestion of the brain sets in.

At five of the clock in the morning of the 22nd day of August 1806, Fragonard enters into the eternal sleep--at the hour that his master Boucher had gone to sleep.

Thus pa.s.sed away the last of the great painters of France's gaiety and lightness of heart.

Madame Fragonard lived to be seventy-seven, dying in 1824. Marguerite Gerard had a happy career as an artist under the Empire and the Restoration, but never married--dying at seventy-six, loaded with honours and in comfortable circ.u.mstances in the year that Queen Victoria came to the throne of England. Thus peacefully ended the days of Fragonard and his immediate kin after the turmoil and fierce tragic years of the Terror.

Painting with prodigal hand a series of elegant masterpieces in a century that made elegance its G.o.d, Fragonard disappeared, neglected and well-nigh discredited for years, with Watteau and Boucher and Greuze for goodly company; but with them, he is come into his own again, lord of a very realm of beauty.

To understand the atmosphere of the France of the seventeen-hundreds before the Revolution it is necessary to understand the art of Watteau, of Boucher, of Fragonard, and of Chardin. Of its pictured romance, Watteau and Boucher and Fragonard hold the keys. To shut the book of these is to be blind to the revelation of the greater part of that romance. Watteau states the new France of light airs and gaiety and pleasant prospects, tinged with sweet melancholy, that became the dream of a France rid of the pomposity and mock-heroics of the Grand Monarque; Boucher fulfils the century; Fragonard utters its swan's note. The art of Fragonard embodies astoundingly the pulsing evening of a century of the life of France, uttering its gay blithe note, skimming over the dangerous deeps of its mighty significance, yet not wholly disregarding the deeps as did the art of his two great forerunners. His is the last word of that mock-heroic France that Louis the Fourteenth built on stately and pompous pretence; that Louis the Fifteenth still further corrupted by the wors.h.i.+p of mere elegance; that Louis the Sixteenth sent to its grave--a suffering people out of which a real France arose, from mighty and awful travail, like a giant, and stood bestriding the world, a superb reality.

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