DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61284#0077
28 VIGEE-LEBRUN
get more money out of the estates by hook or by crook, had done nothing
to brighten the picture.
Louis XVI (the opening of whose reign in 1774 synchronised closely
with the commencement of Elisabeth Vigee’s career) was indeed, as was
well said, “ separated from the people by his faults, and from the nobles by
his virtues,” and was so far from being a spendthrift on his own pleasures
that his moral integrity was one of his gravest defects in the opinion of
his entourage, who could not understand a man voluntarily preferring
lock-making to love-making.
Years before the thundercloud burst over Paris, Marie Antoinette had
become the object of the vilest efforts of scandal-mongers. The story of
the campaign to destroy her reputation is one of the most sickening that
has ever been told, and the fact that she figures in history as a thought-
less pleasure-seeker, not as a really vicious woman, is a triumph for her
over her calumniators. Had she, brought at fifteen as a stranger from
the most pompous to the most depraved of courts, become as bad as her
enemies, there would have been more cause for pity than surprise.
During the early years of her life in France she was feather-headed,
and often very foolish in her conduct. After she became a mother,
she was much more careful and dignified, and had she been under the
influence of honest and prudent people, she would have been spared many
of her worst mistakes.
Unhappily, the set—sometimes divided against itself—of courtiers
who surrounded her, and had her ear at all times, was in most of its
members, its aims and its methods, everything that it ought not to have
been from the point of view of the Queen’s happiness. These people got
riches for themselves by obtaining sinecures and properties through her
assistance; they worked their friends into high positions, even against
her real wishes. But for this “set,” Calonne, for instance, would never
have been Controller-General.
Not only was Elisabeth Vigee born in the same year as Marie Antoi-
nette, not only did she owe her fame and fortune chiefly to the favour of
that unfortunate Queen, but she was subjected, in the less degree that
matched her difference of position, to the aspersions of some of the same
tribe of calumniators that attacked her kindly patroness.
get more money out of the estates by hook or by crook, had done nothing
to brighten the picture.
Louis XVI (the opening of whose reign in 1774 synchronised closely
with the commencement of Elisabeth Vigee’s career) was indeed, as was
well said, “ separated from the people by his faults, and from the nobles by
his virtues,” and was so far from being a spendthrift on his own pleasures
that his moral integrity was one of his gravest defects in the opinion of
his entourage, who could not understand a man voluntarily preferring
lock-making to love-making.
Years before the thundercloud burst over Paris, Marie Antoinette had
become the object of the vilest efforts of scandal-mongers. The story of
the campaign to destroy her reputation is one of the most sickening that
has ever been told, and the fact that she figures in history as a thought-
less pleasure-seeker, not as a really vicious woman, is a triumph for her
over her calumniators. Had she, brought at fifteen as a stranger from
the most pompous to the most depraved of courts, become as bad as her
enemies, there would have been more cause for pity than surprise.
During the early years of her life in France she was feather-headed,
and often very foolish in her conduct. After she became a mother,
she was much more careful and dignified, and had she been under the
influence of honest and prudent people, she would have been spared many
of her worst mistakes.
Unhappily, the set—sometimes divided against itself—of courtiers
who surrounded her, and had her ear at all times, was in most of its
members, its aims and its methods, everything that it ought not to have
been from the point of view of the Queen’s happiness. These people got
riches for themselves by obtaining sinecures and properties through her
assistance; they worked their friends into high positions, even against
her real wishes. But for this “set,” Calonne, for instance, would never
have been Controller-General.
Not only was Elisabeth Vigee born in the same year as Marie Antoi-
nette, not only did she owe her fame and fortune chiefly to the favour of
that unfortunate Queen, but she was subjected, in the less degree that
matched her difference of position, to the aspersions of some of the same
tribe of calumniators that attacked her kindly patroness.