Page:Book of the Riviera.djvu/226

178 He died there August I5th, 1793.

Another Grasse worthy is Fragonard, the painter, a mercer's son, born at Grasse in 1732. He was put as clerk to a notary in early youth, but wearied mortally of the office, and in 1748 was given to the painter Bucher to be trained as an artist. He was in full swing of favour and success in Paris when the Revolution broke out.

"Soon events became tragic, and then began the dusk of that bright and gentle life which had to him hitherto been one long smile. Frago had no thought of flying from the storm, and republicanism always remained idealised in his mind. But sadness oppressed his heart, and his friends shared it with him. These old pensioners of the king, enriched by the aristocracy, could not see without regret the demolition of the ancien régime, and the ruin of their protectors, emigrated, imprisoned, hunted down. Without hating either royalty or Jacobinism, the little group of artists of plebeian birth and bourgeois manners suffered in silence the great revolution in which all their past went down, as the shadows of old age deepened on them. Their art was out of fashion. Their piquant scenes, their dainty subjects, were no longer possible in the midst of political and social convulsions, and a few years sufficed to convert the respect of yesterday into the contempt of to-day. Eighty years must pass before taste and justice could bring men back to love the charming French school of 1770, to understand its importance in the history of the national genius, so as to induce the digging of its relics forth from under the cinders of the Revolution, the empire, and the bourgeois royalty."

A curiously small life must have been that of these little towns under the ancien régime, when the