Plate I. Chiffre d'Amour Frontispiece In the Wallace Collection Page II. The Music Lesson 14 In the Louvre III. L'Etude 24 In the Louvre IV. The Schoolmistress 34 In the Wallace Collection V. Figure de Fantasie 40 In the Louvre VI. Le Voeu à l'Amour 50 In the Louvre (new acquisition) VII. The Fair-haired Boy 60 In the Wallace Collection VIII. Le Billet Doux 70 In the Collection of M. Wildenstein, Paris [Illustration] I THE BEGINNINGS High up, amongst the Sea-Alps that stretch along the southern edge of France, where romantic Provence bathes her sunburnt feet in the blue waters of the Mediterranean, high on the mountain's side hangs the steep little town of Grasse, embowered midst grey-green olive-trees. In as sombre a narrow street as there is in all her dark alleys, on the fifth day of April in the much bewigged and powdered year of 1732, there was born to a glovemaker of the town, worthy mercer Fragonard, a boy-child, whom the priest in the gloomy church christened Jean Honoré Fragonard. As the glovemaker looked out of his sombre house over the sunlit slopes of the grey-green olive-trees that stretched away to the deep blue waters of the sea, he vowed his child to commerce and a thrifty life in this far-away country place that was but little vexed with the high ambitions of distant, fickle, laughing Paris, or her splendid scandals; nay, scarce gave serious thought to her gadding fashions or her feverish vogues--indeed, the attenuated ghosts of these once frantic things wriggled southwards through the provinces on but sluggish feet to the high promenades of Grasse--as the worthy mercer was first in all the little town to know by his modest traffic in them; and that, too, only long after the things they shadowed were buried under new millineries and fopperies and fantastic riot in the gay capital. As a fact, the dark-eyed, long-nosed folk that trudged these steep and narrow thoroughfares were a sluggish people; and sunlit Grasse snored away its day in drowsy fashion.