acter with more consummate
skill than here; never set down action with more vivid brush, catching
movement flying.

[Illustration: Plate VI.]

=====================================================================

It was an age of small oratory. Every man who could string a neat
sentence together, scribbled or harangued. It was boorish and an
unfashionable thing not to be an author, a poetaster, a little orator,
a critic, a dabbler in the arts. At coffee-houses or clubs,
wheresoever men foregathered, some fellow would mount a table and
harangue his friends. The bloods caught the vogue, little foreseeing
that it made a hotbed for the airing of discontents, and for the
parading of ideals which alone could blot out those discontents. All
took to it like ducks to the village pond. There was much quackery;
some honest noise.

Now it so chanced that at Vigee Le Brun's there was a gathering at
which Le Brun--"Pindar" Le Brun the poet--spouting a discourse,
described a Greek supper. The idea at once sprang up that they should
have one straightway; they got up the cook and started to set the thing
going, the poet guiding the making of the sauces. Amidst the general
merriment Vigee Le Brun suggested that they should dress for the
fantastic affair in Greek costume, and arrange the tables and seats
after the antique fashion. So the jocular business went apace. It was
a merry party of Athenians that sat down to the feast--"Pindar" Le Brun
wearing laurels in his ridiculous hair, and a purple mantle round about
him; the Marquis de Cubieres tricked out with a guitar as a golden
lyre; Vigee Le Brun being chief costumier to the frolic, draping
Chaudet the sculptor and others in as near Greek fashion as could be.
Vigee Le Brun, herself in white robes and tunic, and garlanded with
flowers and veiled, seems to have presided over a rollicking gathering.
The noise of the jollification got abroad.

The banquet cost the frugal Vigee Le Brun some fifteen francs in all;
but in the mouths of the spiteful the tale of its extravagance quickly
grew. A few days afterwards there was talk of it at Court; and the
king was solemnly assured by "one who knew," that it had cost 20,000
francs.

This unfortunate Greek supper dogged her steps in the wanderings over
the face of Europe that were to be her long exile. At Rome she was to
discover that it had cost her 40,000 francs; at Vienna it was to rise
to 60,000; and when she reached St. Pet