20. Libertine
Over the next week, Bonnie discovered a great deal about Antoine Lebrun, but in the process, he became rather more of a mystery than less.
Madame Vincent had come through brilliantly on her offer of help. She had not contented herself merely with providing a list of Lebrun scholars, but had gone the additional step of contacting her acquaintances, and requesting a bibliography of the most useful books and articles on Lebrun and his oeuvre. One of these acquaintances, a professor Martineau of the Sorbonne, was pleased to recommend, among other titles, a recent doctoral dissertation by one of his program's star students, Michel Doucette. Entitled Du frivole à l'austère, Doucette's as-yet-unpublished book was a survey of the most important painters of the French Rococo period, and contained a chapter entirely devoted to Lebrun, both as a man and an artist. Such was his enthusiasm for the "new insights" produced by Doucette's work, Martineau had, with the author's kind permission, emailed Bonnie the relevant pages.
Doucette's biography of Lebrun was a far cry from the dry, unvarnished enumeration of dates and places Bonnie had already consulted. Having, for years, poured over dusty volumes of the personal correspondence of long-dead French noblemen and women, Doucette had gleaned a profound understanding of the social and artistic scenes of the late eighteenth century, and had, more importantly, unearthed a wealth of detail about the major painters of the time. His chapter on Lebrun was not only extremely informative but as easy and engaging to read as any novel. Indeed, if Doucette's text had not positively bristled with supporting footnotes, Bonnie might have been tempted to believe he had invented the incidents he recounted out of whole cloth.
From previous research, Bonnie had already learned certain facts: Antoine Lebrun had been born in Paris in 1750, the son of a moderately-successful painter and art-dealer. From a very early age, he had shown exceptional artistic potential, and had been trained, first, by his father, and, in late adolescence, by Pierre-Louis Chauvin, one of the most highly-regarded painters of the era. After only two years of apprenticeship, Lebrun's painting La famille tranquille gained him the coveted Bourse de Rome, a prestigious scholarship that paid his fees and provided him a stipend while he studied for three years in the Eternal City. It was during this period that he met and befriended French age-mate and fellow artist, Eugène Blanchard.
Doucette's wide reading and deep digging had allowed him to flesh out this bare-boned portrait of the young Lebrun. Death records showed that the artist's mother, Marie Anne Lebrun, had died in childbed when he was five years old. His grief-stricken father had not remarried, preferring to raise his son on his own with, in support, the services of a cook-housekeeper, Mme Trouville, herself a widow. Based on the somewhat sentimental, idealized pictures of family life that survived from this phase of Lebrun's career, Doucette deduced that the three-person household, while small, had provided the child with a stable and happy-enough home. The composition of the household did not change until, the housekeeper's strength and energy declining with age, a teen-aged niece, one of twelve children her sister had birthed, was invited to take up service as her aunt's assistant and maid-of-all-work.
Lebrun returned to Paris a more worldly and sophisticated young man, his head full of the marvels, both natural and man-made, that he and his friend Blanchard had seen in Italy and elsewhere on their tour of the continent. His paintings from this period, most of them versions of scenes taken from the Bible or classical mythology, reflected the influence Roman history, art and architecture had exerted on his imagination, and were widely acclaimed for the exuberance of their style and the artist's superb technical skill. One of these paintings was purchased by Louis XV himself, and was displayed for a time at Versailles.
It was at this point in his life that Lebrun, aged twenty-five, completed La Coupe d'amour, the painting which was to be his crowning achievement to date and which, Doucette was at pains to underscore, marked a turning point in both Lebrun's personal and professional life. At the Salon of 1775, La Coupe d'amour, with its gallant subject matter, voluptuous central figure, and graceful, fluid style, was universally proclaimed the year's standout masterpiece. The King's mistress, Madame du Barry, was so taken with the image, she immediately commissioned Lebrun to execute a suite of paintings for her new residence, and where du Barry led, the obscenely-rich, self-indulgent and hedonistic French nobility followed. Lebrun never again unveiled his paintings at officially-sanctioned public art shows. He painted exclusively for the land-owning gentry who fancied themselves patrons of the arts, or who simply wanted to see their lascivious fantasies depicted on canvas.
Whereas before La Coupe d'amour, Lebrun had found his subjects in religion, classical culture, genre scenes and nature, his output afterward tended decidedly toward the erotic, with the occasional painting approaching the mildly pornographic. Doucette cited clear evidence from the historical record that, in some instances, Lebrun was simply accommodating his patron, as in the case of La Balançoire where a lecherous baron had himself represented lying in tall grass in such a position as to be able to see up the skirt of the woman he hoped to make his mistress as she innocently enjoyed herself on a sylvan swing. In opting to picture only illicit lovers' meetings, stolen kisses, naked bathers, entwined couples in various stages of undress and bawdy bedroom scenes, Lebrun may well have been merely reflecting the promiscuity and frivolity of the decadent upper class that employed him, but that explanation, in Doucette's view, only begged the question of why Lebrun had suddenly abandoned his earlier artistic aspirations in favor of unabashed commercialism. It was Doucette's contention that some incident had occurred to sour Lebrun on art in particular and life in general, but, apart from a decisive break with Blanchard, Doucette could discover no watershed event to account for the profound change in Lebrun.
It was over the course of the next fifteen years, a time of unconscionable excess that would eventually culminate in the horrors of the French Revolution, that Lebrun's reputation as a libertine was firmly established. In the letters of Madame de Robitaille, a prominent social hostess of the era, Doucette found several recommendations of Lebrun as a "most obliging" man whose outstanding talents were not limited to the pictorial arts. It was, apparently, generally understood among the bored and idle wives of his noble clients that to hire Lebrun was practically to guarantee oneself supplementary services of the most pleasurable kind. "You will find him somewhat cold in demeanor, bordering, indeed, on insolence," Mme de Robitaille wrote to one of her friends, "but do not let yourself be put off by his prickly manner. You will have nothing to complain of, I assure you, in the performance of his prick." In a reply dated some three months after Lebrun had delivered her portrait, the recipient of this letter, a young countess, announced the joyful news that she and her aged husband had, at long last, conceived a child and possible heir, thereby potentially securing the succession. It did not go unremarked, by Mme de Robitaille and others, that the little boy, as he grew, more closely resembled Lebrun than the Count.
While it was impossible to know precisely how many cuckoos Lebrun had planted in noble nests, it was a matter of record that Lebrun sired no legitimate offspring. He did marry later in life, but for convenience rather than love: the French Revolution having decimated his client base, he found himself in need of a considerable dowry to mend his finances. With the changing times, Lebrun's effervescent, sensual style of painting passed completely out of fashion, and the once-chosen painter of the reviled nobility could not, in the end, make the transition, as Doucette phrased it, from the frivolous to the austere. He died in Paris, poor and largely forgotten, in 1815.
Upon finishing Doucette's chapter, Bonnie felt herself at once better informed and more powerfully intrigued. Why, she found herself wondering along with Doucette, had the ambitious young Lebrun declined the traditional career path of a typical French academician with all its attendant public exposure and critical honors for the unsung if well-remunerated life of a private painter? What could have happened to disillusion so promising a man?
The question was so much on her mind that Bonnie decided to run it by her grandfather. She had been keeping him company as he watched the broadcast of the Nationals' ball game against the visiting Phillies, her mind only half on the action. When the seventh-inning stretch rolled around, she quickly outlined Lebrun's biography for him. "You're a student of human nature, Gramps. Any ideas?"
He did not so much as hesitate. "Cherchez la femme."
It was a second or two before Bonnie could make out his meaning. Grandpa B's French accent was not exactly Parisian. "You think there's a woman at the root of it all?"
Her grandfather shrugged. "It's the first rule of detective fiction. It may be a cliché, but that doesn't mean it can't hold up. You ask me, that Frenchman got his heart broken somewhere along the line, and wound up a bitter, angry guy."
Bonnie was mulling this over when a new excitement in the game-commentator's voice caught her attention. "Now, that's what I call a catch! Bare-handed, too! D'you see that, Dave?"
"Snatched that ball right out of the air! That's right, sir: take a bow! You deserve it!"
Having missed the action, Bonnie watched the instant replay: a foul ball arched high into the stands, where a dark-haired man in a black Nationals' jacket leapt from his seat and stopped the ball in one ungloved hand. Grinning hugely, he proudly held up the ball for the other spectators in his section to admire, and laughingly accepted their applause. "Gramps! Look!" The dead-ringer for her favorite cousin gallantly offered his souvenir to an attractive blond woman whose long, over-processed hair cascaded over her shoulders and down her back. The replay ended before Bonnie could be absolutely sure, but she thought she'd recognized Valeria Dunbar. "That was Eddie!"
"Eddie?" Her grandfather echoed blankly. "Don't think so. Could be, I suppose. I don't know. Didn't get a good look."
There was something about his offhand manner that struck Bonnie as suspect. "Gramps," she said carefully, "there's some game afoot, isn't there? What's going on?"
"The only game I know of is the one I'm watching," he answered somewhat testily, and try as she might, Bonnie could not cajole him into admitting more.
A/N: Those curious about the artist and painting which inspired this sub-plot are invited to google Jean-Honoré Fragonard's "Fountain of Love."