DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61284#0058
A GIFT TO THE ACADEMY
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to the Academy. This gift was especially pleasing to the Perpetual
Secretary, d’Alembert, who had written the lives of all the Academicians
who had died between 1700 and 1772. She received from this highly
distinguished savant a letter which would have given pleasure to anybody,
and which must have been a source of intense delight to a girl of twenty.
Not only, he wrote, had the portraits filled gaps which the Academicians
had long deplored, but they would always remind them of their debt to
her. “ Moreover, Mademoiselle, they will, in their eyes, be a lasting monu-
ment of your exceptional talents, which were known by common report,
and which were enhanced in your case by intelligence, grace, and the most
charming modesty.” On behalf of the Academy he begged her to accept
a permanent invitation to all its public meetings, and on his own behalf
he added that he was glad of the opportunity of assuring her of the high
esteem in which he had long held her on account of her talents and her
personality, an esteem in which he was supported by everybody of good
taste and judgment.
D’Alembert soon followed up his official letter with a personal call.
He was then fifty-eight years old, rather frigid, but extremely polite.
He remained a long while in Mademoiselle Vigee’s studio, saying many
flattering things. When he had gone, a lady of high rank, who happened
to be present, asked Mademoiselle if she had painted the portraits of La
Bruy ere and Cardinal Fleury, of which M. D’Alembert had been speaking,
from life ? As one of the subjects of these pictures had been dead for
eighty years, and the other for thirty, we may almost pardon Elisabeth
Vigee the laugh with which she replied, “ I am a little too young for that.”
15
to the Academy. This gift was especially pleasing to the Perpetual
Secretary, d’Alembert, who had written the lives of all the Academicians
who had died between 1700 and 1772. She received from this highly
distinguished savant a letter which would have given pleasure to anybody,
and which must have been a source of intense delight to a girl of twenty.
Not only, he wrote, had the portraits filled gaps which the Academicians
had long deplored, but they would always remind them of their debt to
her. “ Moreover, Mademoiselle, they will, in their eyes, be a lasting monu-
ment of your exceptional talents, which were known by common report,
and which were enhanced in your case by intelligence, grace, and the most
charming modesty.” On behalf of the Academy he begged her to accept
a permanent invitation to all its public meetings, and on his own behalf
he added that he was glad of the opportunity of assuring her of the high
esteem in which he had long held her on account of her talents and her
personality, an esteem in which he was supported by everybody of good
taste and judgment.
D’Alembert soon followed up his official letter with a personal call.
He was then fifty-eight years old, rather frigid, but extremely polite.
He remained a long while in Mademoiselle Vigee’s studio, saying many
flattering things. When he had gone, a lady of high rank, who happened
to be present, asked Mademoiselle if she had painted the portraits of La
Bruy ere and Cardinal Fleury, of which M. D’Alembert had been speaking,
from life ? As one of the subjects of these pictures had been dead for
eighty years, and the other for thirty, we may almost pardon Elisabeth
Vigee the laugh with which she replied, “ I am a little too young for that.”