ersburg she was to find that,
gathering volume on the long journey, it had increased to 80,000
francs, when she scotched the lie and killed it; but not before it had
served her a very ugly turn.

The truth was that she was being made to share the unpopularity that
had fallen upon the queen. She was painting, and was on friendly terms
with, not only the Royal Family, but with the unpopular ministers and
servants of the crown, and with the noblesse, who in league with the
queen were chiefly concerned in keeping the king from popular measures.
She painted, according to the authorities, in 1785, in her thirtieth
year, the portrait of Calonne though a parchment in the engraving from
it bears the date 1787. The portrait of the minister set slander going
against the artist, as regards the vast sum paid for it. The portrait
of the seated minister ends below the knees; and it was of this picture
of the weak Calonne, who clung so limpet-like to office, that Sophie
Arnould, seeing it at the Salon, made the neat remark: "It is because
he sticks to office that Madame Le Brun has cut off his legs." But
whether she received much or little mattered not much to Vigee Le Brun;
her husband seized and squandered all she earned. As a matter of fact,
she received 3600 francs for the portrait from Calonne, sent in a
handsome box worth 1200 francs--a couple of hundred pounds at the
outside. It was a small price compared to the sums she was now
receiving for portraits; Beaujou, the financier, paid 8000 francs (say
300 guineas); Prince Lubomirski 20,000 francs (L800)--not that the poor
maker of these works gained thereby, for her precious picture-dealer
husband had it according to his habit, and she had difficulty and a
scene even to get two louis from the price when she asked the rogue for
it. However, her reputation ever increased. She showed at this same
Salon of 1785, in her thirtieth year, the portrait of the little
Dauphin of four years and his seven-year-old sister, the Madame Royale,
seated on a bank, the boy's hat thrown at his feet upon the
flower-strewn ground--a work in which her colour-sense, her fine
arrangement, and her feeling for style reach to their highest flight.
It is perhaps the most wholly successful and most complete and masterly
canvas of her long career. It hangs in Versailles, a pathetic comment,
this happy moment in the children's life, when the days looked rosy and
all the world was a beautiful garden.

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