ONE:THE society of the Palais Royal was at that time the most brilliant and witty in Paris, and she soon became quite at home there. The Comtesse de Blot, lady of honour to the Duchesse de Chartres, was pleasant enough when she was not trying to pose as a learned woman, at which times her long dissertations were tiresome and absurd; she was also ambitious, and what was worse, avaricious.
TWO:She had only to choose amongst the great personages who wanted their portraits painted; and she spent the time when she was not working in wandering amid the scenes to visit which had been the dream of her life. Ruins of temples, baths, acqueducts, tombs, and monuments of the vanished Empire, gorgeous churches and palaces of the Renaissance, huge never-ending galleries of statues and pictures, the glories of Greek and of medi?val art; Phidias and Praxiteles, Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, and Leonardo; the picturesque beauty of Rome, as it was then, the delicious gardens, since swept away by the greedy vandalism of their owners; the mighty Colosseum; the solemn desolate Campagna; all filled her mind and imagination and distracted her thoughts from France and the horrors going on there. At Rome in those days there certainly seemed to be everything that could be wished for to make life a paradise upon earth. Besides the natural beauty, the historical and arch?ological interest, and the treasures of art, the magnificence of the ecclesiastical functions, church services, stately processions, and entrancing music were a perpetual delight to her. There is no city in the world, she wrote to a [96] friend, in which one could pass ones time so deliciously as in Rome, even if one were deprived of all the resources of good society.There was by this time a perfect rage to be painted by Mme. Le Brun. At a performance at the Vaudeville, called La Runion des Arts, Painting was represented by an actress made up into an exact copy of Mme. Le Brun, painting the portrait of the Queen.
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