The bad state of his health seriously interfered with his work during the next few years, and his contributions to the Salon of 1741 were restricted to "The Morning Toilet" and "M. Lenoir's Son building a Card Castle," whilst he was an absentee from the following year's exhibition. In 1743 Chardin lost his mother, with whom he had been living since his wife's death, and who had been looking after his boy's early education. Chardin, slow worker as he always was, and overwhelmed with commissions for new pictures and replicas, which he continued to paint at starvation rates, had no time to devote to the bringing up of his son, which was perhaps one of the reasons which induced him to marry, in the year following his mother's death, a musketeer's widow, of thirty-seven, Françoise Marguerite Pouget, a worthy woman of no particular personal charm, to judge from the portrait left by the master's chalks, but an excellent housekeeper who managed to bring a certain degree of order into her husband's affairs, and proved to be of no little assistance to him in his business dealings. It was not exactly a love match, but there is no reason for doubting that the two worthy people lived in complete harmony and enjoyed a fair amount of comfort. The repeated references to his "financial troubles" need not be taken in too literal a sense, since from 1744, the year of his marriage, when he transferred his quarters to his wife's house in the Rue Princesse, until 1774, when his affairs really took a turn for the bad, he enjoyed the ownership of a house which he was then able to sell for 18,000 livres, a by no means paltry amount for these days. Moreover, in 1752, Lépicié's endeavours resulted in the grant of a pension of 500 livres by the king, which, according to the petitioner's own words, was sufficient to secure Chardin's comfort. True enough, when the artist died in 1779, his widow applied for relief on the pretext of being practically left without means of subsistence. But an investigation of the case led to the discovery that she was in enjoyment of an annual income of from 6000 to 8000 livres! A daughter, who was born to the master by his second wife, died soon after having seen the light of the world. The year 1746 was apparently more productive than the five preceding years; but henceforth the number of his subject pictures became more and more restricted, and Chardin, perhaps discouraged by the public grumbling at his lack of original invention, returned to the sphere of his early successes--to still-life. Meanwhile his probity and uprightness had gained him the highest esteem of his Academic colleagues and brought him new honours in his official position. He was appointed Treasurer of the Academy in 1755, and soon afterwards succeeded J. A. Portail as "hanger" of the Salon exhibition, a difficult office which needed a man of Chardin's tact, fairness, and honesty.