Yet Du Barry, when all her faults are set against her, suffered undue execration. She had no grain of ill-will in her nature. During her reign the Bastille received no prisoner at her ordering--vengeance was not in her. She was the tool of unscrupulous men; but she came between them and their base vengeances, and kept the Court free from the brutalities that the Pompadour meted out to her enemies without a pang of remorse. During the whole of her reign, she visited her old mother every fortnight, and lavished benefits on her kin--whom most women, thus suddenly raised to the noblesse, would have avoided like a plague. The scoundrels who made her their toy were responsible for every evil deed that she was accused of committing. And even the new king, whose sharp _lettre de cachet_, written two days after he came to the throne, banished her to a convent, soon relented, and allowed her to go back to her home at Luciennes. The Du Barry had striven to abolish the _lettre de cachet_; the new king brought it back, inaugurating his reign by having one sent to the woman whose gentleness and kindliness had shrunk from the accursed thing. It was a fit omen of the well-meaning but incompetent king's tragic reign which was about to begin. To Fragonard these things were but tattle; yet the doing of them was to reach to his hearth; the consequences of them were to strip him bare and wreck him--he was to see his wife and womenkind dragging through the streets of Paris to beg bread and meat at the gates of the city. But the future was mercifully hidden from him. He was now at the height of his career; and was to taste wider success. [Illustration: PLATE VII.--THE FAIR-HAIRED BOY (In the Wallace Collection) To the visitor to the Wallace collection the picture by Fragonard next best known after the "Chiffre d'Amour" and the "Swing," is this exquisite study of a fair-haired boy--the child is painted with a subtle grace and consummate delicacy rarely combined with the directness and impressionism here displayed by Fragonard.] Fragonard's name will always be linked with that of his friend and patron, a wealthy man, the farmer-general Bergeret de Grandcour. His family visited at the rich man's houses in town and country. Now the career of a rich man was incomplete without the making of the Grand Tour. At the least the gentleman of means must have roamed through Italy. And it was thus that, with Bergeret de Grandcour, Fragonard now made his second journey into Italy in his forty-second year. Fragonard was delighted at the prospect of seeing his loved Italy again after twelve years. It was a family party--Fragonard and his wife, with Bergeret de Grandcour and his son, to say nothing of Bergeret's servants and cook and following. It was a happy, merry journeying in extravagant luxury.