La Décennie d'Or

One of the very nicest things on the Net is the Mme. Vigée Le Brun portrait gallery hosted by (so help me) Bat Guano. Every so often I boot it up and, as it were, revisit that magical, elegant, sweetest of times, seeing it come alive in the wonderful speaking likenesses of Mme. Le Brun's deft, original, and polished portraiture. And nearly every time I return to it I discover something, "some one," in it that I had overlooked before--yet another gentle and gallant, brave and innocent soul doomed within but a few years of its representation here to a brutal and tragic fate in the pitiless horror of the revolution. Such as Mme. Elisabeth, sister of Louis XVI, whom we see here in the portrait painted by Mme. Le Brun in 1782--guillotined May 10, 1794.

At the scaffold they had the barbarity to to reserve her for the last. All the women, in leaving the cart, begged to embrace her. She kissed them, and with her usual benignity, said some words of comfort to each. Her strength never abandoned her, and she died with the resignation of the purest piety.