There lived in Grasse, with its rich harvests of flowers, and given to the distilling of perfumes therefrom, a family that had come from Avignon--its name, Gérard, and on friendly terms with the Fragonards. It so chanced that a young woman of the family, the seventeen-year-old Marie Anne Gérard, was sent to Paris, to the care of Fragonard, in order to earn her living in the shop of a scent-seller, one Isnard. The girl had artistic leanings, and fell a-painting of fans and miniatures. She had need of a teacher; and who better qualified for the business than her townsman, the famous Fragonard? What more natural than that Fragonard should become her master? She was a jovial girl. So they would talk of home, and the people amongst whom they had been bred. She was no particular beauty, as her picture by Fragonard proves; she had the rough accent of Provence; was thick-set and clumsy of figure, and of heavy features, but she had the youth and freshness and health of a young woman's teens, that hide the blemishes and full significance of these coarsenesses. She and Fragonard fell a-kissing. Fragonard, now thirty-seven, married Marie Anne Gérard in her eighteenth year; and she bore him a much loved daughter, Rosalie--and ten years later, in 1780, a son, Alexandre Evariste Fragonard. There came to live with the newly married couple his wife's younger sister Marguerite and her young brother Henri Gérard, who was learning engraving. [Illustration: PLATE VI.--LE VOEU À L'AMOUR (In the Louvre) This is an example of Fragonard in his grand-manner mood--a picture of the large decorative years that produced such masterpieces as the "Serment d'Amour," in which we see him ever interested above all things in the painting of bosky leafage and the dignity of great trees for background.] Fragonard's marriage at once affected his habits and his art. The wild oats of his artistic career were near sown. The naughtinesses of girls of pleasure gave place to the grace and tenderness of the home-life--the cradle took the place of the bed of light adventures; and children blossomed on to his canvases. He set aside the make-believe shepherds and shepherdesses of the vogue; and henceforth painted the "real thing" in rural surroundings.