Naples—Lady Hamilton—Marie Caroline, Queen of Naples—Mesdames de France—Their escape—Les chemises de Marat—Rome—Terrible news from France—Venice—Turin—The Comtesse de Provence—The 10th August—The Refugees—Milan—Vienna—Delightful society—Prince von Kaunitz—Life at Vienna.
Capital letter I
IN the autumn of 1790 Lisette went to Naples, with which she was enchanted. She took a house on the Chiaja, looking across the bay to Capri and close to the Russian Embassy. The Ambassador, Count Scawronski, called immediately and begged her to breakfast and dine always at his house, where, although not accepting this invitation, she spent nearly all her evenings. She painted his wife, and, after her, Emma Harte, then the mistress of Sir William Hamilton, as a bacchante, lying on the sea-shore with her splendid chestnut hair falling loosely about her in masses sufficient to cover her. Sir William Hamilton, who was exceedingly avaricious, paid her a hundred louis for the picture, and afterwards sold it in London for three hundred guineas. Later on, Mme. Le Brun, having painted her as a Sybil for the Duc de Brissac after she became Lady Hamilton, copied the head and gave it to Sir William, who sold that also!
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Another time she made a charcoal sketch of two heads on the door of a summer-house by the sea, lent to her by Sir William Hamilton. Years afterwards to her astonishment she saw them in England. He had cut them out of the door and sold them to Lord Warwick!
Mme. Le Brun found Lady Hamilton, as she became shortly afterwards—though extraordinarily beautiful—ignorant, ill-dressed, without esprit or conversation, ill-natured, and spiteful in her way of talking about other people, the only topic she seemed capable of discussing. She herself enjoyed Naples, as she did every other pleasant episode in her delightful life. From the loggia opening out of her bedroom she looked down into an orange garden; from her windows she could see constantly some picturesque or beautiful scene. The costumes of the washerwomen who gathered round the fountain, peasant girls dancing the tarantella, the fiery torches of the fishermen scattered over the bay at night, all the life and colour and incident of southern life spread like a panorama before her; and often she would go out in a boat by moonlight or starlight upon the calm sea, looking back upon the town rising like an amphitheatre from the water’s edge.
She found as usual plenty of friends, the Princesse Joseph de Monaco and Duchesse de Fleury amongst others, and the Baron de Talleyrand, then French Ambassador. They made excursions to Vesuvius, Pompei, Capri, Ischia, and all the lovely places in the neighbourhood.
One day the Baron de Talleyrand announced that [106] the Queen wished her to paint the portraits of her two eldest daughters, whose marriages she was just going to Vienna to arrange. [39]
Lisette liked the Queen of Naples much better than her elder sister, the Infanta of Parma. Though less beautiful than her younger sister, Marie Antoinette, yet she bore a strong resemblance to her, and had the remains of great beauty.
Mme. Le Brun describes her as affectionate, simple, and royally generous. Hearing that the French Ambassador to Venice, M. de Bombelle, was the only one who refused to sign the Constitution, thereby reducing himself and his family to poverty; she wrote to him that all sovereigns owed a debt of gratitude to faithful subjects, and gave him a pension of twelve thousand francs. Two of his sons became Austrian ministers at Turin and Berne, another was Grand-Master of the household of Marie Louise.
The most infamous calumnies were circulated about Marie Caroline when Napoleon wanted her kingdom for Caroline Murat; but she had a brave, strong character and plenty of brains. The government was carried on by her, for the King could or would do nothing but loiter about at Caserta.
Lisette painted the two Princesses and the Prince Royal before returning to Rome, where she had no sooner arrived than she had to go back to Naples to paint the Queen.
She had had great success in the number of important pictures she painted at Naples; and her [107] career at Rome was equally prosperous. She had plenty of money now, and nobody to meddle with it, and if it had not been for the constant anxiety about France she would have been perfectly happy. But French news was difficult to get and bad when it was obtained.
E. H. Bearne
ROME
Mesdames de France, the two last remaining daughters of Louis XV., arrived in Rome and at once sent for Mme. Le Brun, who was delighted to see them again. They had with great difficulty succeeded in getting away, and had been most anxious to take their niece, Madame Elizabeth, with them. In vain they entreated her to come, she persisted in staying with the King and Queen, and sacrificed her life in so doing.
Mesdames Adéla?de and Victoire set off early in 1791. Their whole journey was a perpetual danger. After getting their passports signed with difficulty by the Commune, they were denounced at Sèvres by a maid-servant, stopped by the Jacobins and accused of being concerned in plots and of taking money out of the country, and detained for a fortnight, when they managed to get permission to go on, and left at 10 o’clock on a Saturday night, arriving on Sunday morning at Fontainebleau, where they were again stopped and threatened by the mob, who were just going to be joined by the gardes nationaux when a hundred Chasseurs de Lorraine, luckily quartered there, charged the mob, opened the gates, and passed the carriages on. At Arnay-le-Duc they were detained for eleven days, and only allowed to proceed when the Comte de Narbonne appeared with a permission extorted by [108] Mirabeau from the revolutionary government at Paris.
They hurried away just in time, crossed the Mont Cenis, which was covered with snow, and at the foot of which they were met by their nephew, the Comte d’Artois. The King of Sardinia, husband of their niece, [40] the eldest sister of Louis XVI. had sent four hundred soldiers to clear away the snow, and escorted by the Comte d’Artois they arrived safely at Turin where all the noblesse were assembled to receive them at the entrance of the royal palace. They arrived at Rome in April.
The disgraceful proceedings and cowardly, preposterous fear of two old ladies, which had made the radical government contemptible and ridiculous, caused the following absurd story to be published in a French newspaper:—
“Les chemises de Marat, ou l’arrestation de Mesdames, tantes du Roi à Arnay-le-Duc.
“Marat avait dit dans un journal que les chemises de Mesdames lui appartenaient. Les patriotes de province crurent de bonne foi que Mesdames avaient emporté les chemises de Marat, et les habitants d’Arnay-ci-devant-le-duc sachant qu’elles devaient passer par là, decidèrent qu’il fallait les arrêter pour leur, faire rendre les chemises qu’elles avaient voleés.... On les fait descendre de voiture et les officiers municipales avec leurs habits noirs, leur gravité, leurs écharpes, leur civism et leurs perruques, disent à Mesdames:
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“(Air: ‘Rendez-moi mon écuelle de bois.’)
“Donnez-nous les chemises
à Marat,
Donnez-nous les chemises;
Nous savons à n’en douter pas
Que vous les avez prises.
“Mme. Adéla?de, étonnée d’un tel propos répond sur le même air:
“Je n’ai point les chemises
De Marat,
Je n’ai point les chemises;
Cherchez, Messieurs les magistrats
Cherchez dans nos valises.
“Mme. Victoire dit à son tour:
“Avait-il des chemises,
Marat?
Avait il des chemises?
Moi, je crois qu’il n’en avait pas,
Où les aurait-il prises?
“MM. les magistrats, connaissant de réputation les chemises de l’écrivain, répondent avec une gravité toute municipale:
“Il en avait trois grises
Marat,
Il en avait trois grises,
Avec l’argent de son fatras
Sur le Pont Neuf acquises.
“La municipalité se met alors en devoir de fouiller dans les malles de Mesdames, en disant:
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“Cherchons bien les chemises
à Marat
Cherchons bien les chemises
C’est pour vous un fort vilain cas
Si vous les avez prises.
“Enfin, ne pouvant pas distinguer, parmi tant de chemises lesquelles appartenaient à Marat, et les tantes du roi persistant à nier qu’elles eussent, derobé celles du grand homme, la municipalité d’Arnay-ci-devant-le-duc, accorda à Mesdames la permission de continuer leur voyage après les avoir retenues prisonnières l’espace de dix jours.”
Mme. Le Brun painted the portrait first of Madame Adéla?de, then of Madame Victoire.
The latter, during her last sitting, said to her—
“I have received some news which fills me with joy; I hear the King has escaped from France, and I have just written to him, only addressing—To His Majesty the King of France. They will know very well where to find him,” she added smiling.
Mme. Le Brun returned home and told the good news to her daughter’s governess. But while they were rejoicing over it they, in the evening, heard one of their servants singing below, a sullen, gloomy fellow who never used to sing, and whom they knew to be a revolutionist. Looking at each other in terror they exclaimed—
“Some misfortune has happened to the King.”
Next morning they heard of the arrest of the royal family at Varennes.
Most of the servants were bribed by the Jacobins to spy upon their masters, and knew much better than they what was going on in France. Many of [111] them used to go and meet the courrier who told them much more than was contained in the letters he brought. After having lived two years and a half in Italy, chiefly in Rome, Mme. Le Brun began to think of returning to France.
How she could have entertained so mad an idea seems inexplicable; but in fact, bad as the French news was, she was far from understanding the frightful state of the country. In those days news travelled slowly, important events only became partially known long after they had taken place; and as to private letters, people dared not put in them anything which might endanger either themselves or their friends.
Her mother, brother, and sister-in-law, to all of whom she was strongly attached, were in France, and she was anxious to see them; so, with deep regret and many tears, she left Rome and turned her steps northward, of course with her child and governess.
They left Rome late in April, 1792, and travelled slowly along by Perugia, Florence, Siena, Parma, and Mantova to Venice, where they arrived the eve of the Ascension, and saw the splendid ceremony of the marriage of the Doge and the Adriatic. There was a magnificent fête in the evening, the battle of the gondoliers and illumination of the Piazza di San Marco; where a fair as well as the illumination went on for a fortnight.
Venice was crowded with foreigners, amongst whom was one of the English princes; and Lisette’s friend, the Princesse Joseph de Monaco, whom she saw for the last time, she also being on her way to France, where she met her death.
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She also met an acquaintance, M. Denon, who introduced her to the Comtesse Marini, of whom he was then the cavalière servente; and who at once invited her to go that evening to a café.
Lisette, to whom such an invitation was unfamiliar, accepted however; and the Countess then said—
“Have you no friend to accompany you?”
“I have no one with me,” replied she, “but my daughter and her governess.”
“Oh, well!” said the Countess, “you must anyhow appear to have somebody; I will lend you M. Denon all the time you are here; he will give you his arm, I will take somebody else’s arm, and people will think I have quarrelled with him, for you can’t go about here without un ami.”
E. H. Bearne
VENICE
The arrangement proved entirely satisfactory. Lisette went about all day with M. Denon, in gondolas, and to see everything—churches, pictures, palaces; every one who knows Venice even now, knows it as a place of enchantment, unlike anything else on earth; and in those days the Doge still reigned, modern desecrations and eyesores were not, and the beauty of the life and surroundings of the Queen of the Adriatic was supreme.
Lisette frequented chiefly the society of the Spanish Ambassadress, with whom she went to the Opera at the far-famed Fenice, and finally left Venice and went by Padova, Vicenza, and Verona to Turin, where she had letters of introduction from Mesdames to ............