Louis the Sixteenth, third son of the Dauphin who had been Louis the Fifteenth’s only lawful son, ascended the throne in his twentieth year, a pure-minded young fellow, full of good intentions, sincerely anxious for the well-being of his people; but of a diffident and timid character, and under the influence of a young consort, the beautiful Queen Marie Antoinette, of imperious temper and of light and frivolous manners, who brought to her counsels a deplorable lack of judgment.

The Du Barry sent a-packing, and d’Aiguillon and the rest of their crew, the young king recalled the crafty old Maurepas who had been banished by the Pompadour, an ill move—though the setting of Turgot over the finances augured well. And when the great minister Turgot fell, he gave way to as good a man, the worthy honest banker, Neckar.

In a happy hour Fragonard was granted by the king the eagerly sought haven of the artists of his time—a studio and apartments at the old palace of the Louvre, as his master Boucher had been granted them before him.

Settling in with his wife, his girl Rosalie, his son Alexandre Evariste, and his talented sister-in-law Marguerite GÉrard, he lived thereat a life almost opulent, making large sums of money, some eight thousand pounds a year, at this time. He joyed in decorating his rooms. He was the life and soul of a group of brilliant men who gathered about him, having the deepest affection for him.

His sister-in-law, Marguerite GÉrard, was as gay and distinguished in manners, and as beautiful, as his jovial wife was dull and vulgar and coarse—the vile accent of Grasse, that made his wife’s speech horrible to the ear, becoming slurred into a shadow of itself on Marguerite’s tongue, and turned by the enchanting accents of the younger sister’s lips into seduction. This girl’s friendship and companionship became an ever-increasing delight to the aging painter. Their correspondence, when apart, was passionately affectionate. Ugly scandals got abroad—scandals difficult to prove or disprove. The man and woman were of like tastes, of like temperaments; it was, likely enough, little more than that. The girl was of a somewhat cold nature; and we must read her last letters as censoriously as her first—when, in reply to Fragonard, evil days having fallen upon him, and being old and next to ruined, on his asking her for money to help him, she, who owed everything to him, refused him with the trite sermon: “to practise economy, to be reasonable, and to remember that in brooding over fancies one only increases them without being any the happier.” But this was not as yet.

Fragonard, happy in his home at the Louvre, free from cares, content amongst devoted friends, reached his fifty-fifth year when he had suddenly to gaze horrified at the first ugly hint that, in the years to come, he must expect to hear the scythe of the Great Reaper—know the passing of friends and loved ones. He was to reel under the first serious blow of his life. His bright, witty, winsome girl Rosalie died in her eighteenth year. It nearly killed him.

But there was a blacker, a vaster shadow came looming over the land—a threat that boded ill for such as took life too airily.

In an unfortunate moment for the royal house, and against the will of the king and of Neckar, the nation went mad with enthusiasm over England’s revolted American colonies; and the alliance was formed that France swore not to sever until America was declared independent. It started the war with England. The successes of the revolted colonies made the coming of the Revolution in France a certainty. The fall of Neckar and the rise of the new minister, Calonne, sent France rushing to the brink. The distress of the people became unbearable. The royal family and the Court sank in the people’s respect, and the people were no longer the people of the decade before—they had watched the Revolution in America, and they had seen the Revolution victorious. The fall of Calonne only led to the rise of the turbulent and stupid Cardinal de Brienne; and the Court was completely foul of the people when De Brienne threw up office in a panic and fled across the frontier, leaving the Government in utter confusion.

The king recalled Neckar. The calling of the States-General now became assured. Paris rang with the exultation of the Third Estate.

The States-General met at Versailles on the 5th of May 1789. The monarchy was at an end. In little over a month the States-General created itself the National Assembly. The Revolution was begun. The 14th of July saw the fall of the Bastille. On the 22nd the people hanged Foulon to the street-lamp at the corner of the Place de GrÈve—and À la lanterne! became the cry of fashion.

Fragonard was in his fifty-seventh year when he heard in his lodging at the Louvre the thunderclap of this 14th of July 1789—saw the dawn of the Revolution.

The rose of the dawn was soon to turn to blood-red crimson. The storm had been muttering and growling its curses for years before the death of Louis the Fifteenth. It came up in threatening blackness darkly behind the dawn, and was soon to break with a roar upon reckless Paris. It came responsive to the rattle of musketry in the far West, hard by Boston harbour.

Fragonard and his friends were of the independents—they were liberals whom love of elegance had not prevented from sympathising with the sufferings of the people, and who had thrilled with the new thought. Fragonard’s intelligence drew him naturally towards the new ideas; indeed he owed little to the Court; and when France was threatened by the coalition of Europe against her, he, with GÉrard, David, and others, went on the 7th of September with the artist’s womenfolk to give up their jewelry to the National Assembly.

But the storm burst, and soon affairs became tragic red.

There came, for the ruin of the cause of a constitutional monarchy and to end the last hope of the Court party, the unfortunate death of Mirabeau—the hesitations of the king—his foolish flight to Varennes—his arrest.

The constitutional party in the Legislative Assembly, at first dominant, became subordinate to the more violent but more able Girondists, with their extreme wing of Jacobins under Robespierre, and Cordeliers under Danton, Marat, Camille Desmoulins, and Fabre d’Eglantine. The proscription of all emigrants quickly followed. It was as unsafe to leave as to stay in Paris. The queen’s insane enmity towards Lafayette finished the king’s business. On the night of the 9th of August the dread tocsin sounded the note of doom to the royal cause—herald to the bloodshed of the morrow. Three days afterwards, the king and the royal family were prisoners in the Temple.

The National Convention met for the first time on the 21st of September 1792; decreed the First Year of the Republic, abolished Royalty and the titles of courtesy, decreed in their place citoyen and citoyenne, and the use of tu and toi for vous.

The National Convention also displayed the antagonism of the two wings of the now all-powerful Girondist party—the Girondists and the Jacobins or Montagnards. The conflict began with the quarrel as to whether the king could be tried. The 10th of January 1793 saw the king’s head fall to the guillotine—the Jacobins had triumphed. War with Europe followed, and the deadly struggle between the Girondists and Jacobins for supreme power. The 27th of May 1793 witnessed the appointment of the terrible and secret Committee of Public Safety. By June the Girondists had wholly fallen. Charlotte Corday’s stabbing of Marat in his bath left the way clear for Robespierre’s ambition. The Jacobins in power, the year of the Reign of Terror began—July 1793 to July 1794—with Robespierre as the lord of the hellish business. The scaffolds reeked with blood—from that of Marie Antoinette and EgalitÉ Orleans to that of the Girondist deputies and Madame Roland, and the most insignificant beggar suspected of the vague charge of “hostility to the Republic.” In a mad moment the Du Barry, who had shown the noblest side of her character in befriending the old allies of her bygone days of greatness, published a notice of a theft from her house. It drew all eyes to her wealth. And she went to the guillotine shrieking with terror and betraying all who had protected her. Then came strife amongst the Jacobins. Robespierre and Danton fought the scoundrel HÉbert for life, and overthrew him. The Hebertists went to the guillotine, dying in abject terror. Danton, with his appeals for cessation of the bloodshed of the Terror, alone stood between Robespierre and supreme power. Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Eglantine and their humane fellows, were sent to the guillotine. Between the 10th of June and the 27th of July, in 1794, fourteen hundred people in Paris alone died on the scaffold.

Fragonard dreaded to fly from the tempest. It was as safe to remain in Paris as to leave the city. Any day he might be taken. Sadness fell upon him and ate into his heart. The old artist could not look without uneasiness upon the ruin of the aristocracy, of the farmers-general, and of the gentle class, now in exile or prison or under trial—his means of livelihood utterly gone. Without hate for Royalty or for the Republic, the artists, by birth plebeian and in manners bourgeois, many of them old men, could but blink with fearful eyes at the vast upheaval. Their art was completely put out of fashion—a new art, solemn and severe, classical and heroic, was born. For half a century the charming art of France of the eighteenth century lay wholly buried—a thing of contempt wherever it showed above the ashes.

Fragonard’s powerful young friend David, the painter, now stood sternly watchful over the old man’s welfare; and David was at the height of his popularity—he was a member of the Convention. He took every opportunity to show his friendship publicly, visited Fragonard regularly, secured him his lodgings at the Louvre, brought about his election to the jury of the Arts created by the Convention to take the place of the Royal Academy.

But the old artist was bewildered.

The national enthusiasm was not in him. The artists were ruined by the destruction of their pensions. The buyers of Fragonard’s pictures were dispersed, their power and their money gone, their favour dissipated. Fragonard worked on without conviction or truth. The new school uprooted all his settled ideals. He struggled hard to catch the new ideas, and failed. He helped to plant a tree of liberty in the court of the Louvre, meditating the while how he could be gone from Paris—it was a tragic farce, played with his soul. The glories of the Revolution alarmed the old man. He saw the kinsfolk of his friends dragged off to the guillotine. He had guarded against suspicion and arrest by giving a certificate early in 1794, the year of the Terror, stating that he had no intention of emigrating, adding a statement of residence, and avowing his citizenship. He felt that even these acts were not enough protection in these terrible years. No man knew when or where the blow might fall—at what place or moment he might be seized, or on what charge, and sent to the guillotine. Friends were taken in the night. Hubert Robert was seized and flung into Saint Lazare, escaping death but by an accident. The state of misery and want amongst the artists and their wives and families at this time was pitiable.

Fragonard gladly snatched at the invitation of an old friend of his family, Monsieur Maubert, to go to him at Grasse during these anxious times of the travail that had come upon France.

Shortly after that Sunday in December when the Du Barry went shrieking to her hideous death at the guillotine, Fragonard, turning his face to the South of his birth, was rolling up amongst his baggage the four finished canvases of “The Romance of Love and Youth,” and the unfinished fifth canvas, “Deserted,” ordered and repudiated by the Du Barry. He bundled his family into a chaise, and lumbered out of Paris, rumbling on clattering wheels through the guards at the gates, and making southwards towards Provence for his friend’s house at Grasse. Here, far away from the din and strife, Fragonard set up his world-famous decorative panels in the salon of his host, which they admirably fitted, painting for the overdoors, “Love the Conqueror,” “Love-folly,” “Love pursuing a Dove,” “Love embracing the Universe,” and a panel over the fireplace, “Triumph of Love.” He also painted during his stay the portraits of the brothers Maubert; and, to keep his host safe from ugly rumours and unfriendly eyes, he decorated the vestibule with revolutionary emblems, phrygian bonnet, axes and faggots, and the masks of Robespierre and the AbbÉ Gregoire, and the like trickings of red republicanism.... His host was the maternal grandfather of the Malvilan, at whose death in 1903, the room and its decorations were sold to an American collector for a huge sum of money.

Meanwhile, able and resolute men had determined that Robespierre and the Terror must end. Robespierre went to the guillotine. The Revolution of the Ninth Thermidor put an end to the Terror in July 1794.

All this time the armies of France were winning the respect of the world by their gallantry and skill. The 23rd of September 1795, saw France establish the Directory—the 5th of October, the Day of the Sections, saw the stiff fight about the Church of St. Roch, and Napoleon Bonaparte appointed second-in-command of the army. The young general was soon Commander-in-Chief. And France thenceforth advanced, spite of the many blunders of the Directory, with all the genius of her race, to the splendid recovery of her fortunes, and to a greatness which was to be the wonder and admiration and dread of the world.

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.