Settling in with his wife, his girl Rosalie, his son Alexandre Evariste, and his talented sister-in-law Marguerite Gérard, he lived thereat a life almost opulent, making large sums of money, some eight thousand pounds a year, at this time. He joyed in decorating his rooms. He was the life and soul of a group of brilliant men who gathered about him, having the deepest affection for him. His sister-in-law, Marguerite Gérard, was as gay and distinguished in manners, and as beautiful, as his jovial wife was dull and vulgar and coarse--the vile accent of Grasse, that made his wife's speech horrible to the ear, becoming slurred into a shadow of itself on Marguerite's tongue, and turned by the enchanting accents of the younger sister's lips into seduction. This girl's friendship and companionship became an ever-increasing delight to the aging painter. Their correspondence, when apart, was passionately affectionate. Ugly scandals got abroad--scandals difficult to prove or disprove. The man and woman were of like tastes, of like temperaments; it was, likely enough, little more than that. The girl was of a somewhat cold nature; and we must read her last letters as censoriously as her first--when, in reply to Fragonard, evil days having fallen upon him, and being old and next to ruined, on his asking her for money to help him, she, who owed everything to him, refused him with the trite sermon: "to practise economy, to be reasonable, and to remember that in brooding over fancies one only increases them without being any the happier." But this was not as yet. Fragonard, happy in his home at the Louvre, free from cares, content amongst devoted friends, reached his fifty-fifth year when he had suddenly to gaze horrified at the first ugly hint that, in the years to come, he must expect to hear the scythe of the Great Reaper--know the passing of friends and loved ones. He was to reel under the first serious blow of his life. His bright, witty, winsome girl Rosalie died in her eighteenth year. It nearly killed him. But there was a blacker, a vaster shadow came looming over the land--a threat that boded ill for such as took life too airily.