Paris alone died on the scaffold. Fragonard dreaded to fly from the tempest. It was as safe to remain in Paris as to leave the city. Any day he might be taken. Sadness fell upon him and ate into his heart. The old artist could not look without uneasiness upon the ruin of the aristocracy, of the farmers-general, and of the gentle class, now in exile or prison or under trial--his means of livelihood utterly gone. Without hate for Royalty or for the Republic, the artists, by birth plebeian and in manners bourgeois, many of them old men, could but blink with fearful eyes at the vast upheaval. Their art was completely put out of fashion--a new art, solemn and severe, classical and heroic, was born. For half a century the charming art of France of the eighteenth century lay wholly buried--a thing of contempt wherever it showed above the ashes. Fragonard's powerful young friend David, the painter, now stood sternly watchful over the old man's welfare; and David was at the height of his popularity--he was a member of the Convention. He took every opportunity to show his friendship publicly, visited Fragonard regularly, secured him his lodgings at the Louvre, brought about his election to the jury of the Arts created by the Convention to take the place of the Royal Academy. But the old artist was bewildered. The national enthusiasm was not in him. The artists were ruined by the destruction of their pensions. The buyers of Fragonard's pictures were dispersed, their power and their money gone, their favour dissipated. Fragonard worked on without conviction or truth. The new school uprooted all his settled ideals. He struggled hard to catch the new ideas, and failed. He helped to plant a tree of liberty in the court of the Louvre, meditating the while how he could be gone from Paris--it was a tragic farce, played with his soul. The glories of the Revolution alarmed the old man. He saw the kinsfolk of his friends dragged off to the guillotine. He had guarded against suspicion and arrest by giving a certificate early in 1794, the year of the Terror, stating that he had no intention of emigrating, adding a statement of residence, and avowing his citizenship. He felt that even these acts were not enough protection in these terrible years. No man knew when or where the blow might fall--at what place or moment he might be seized, or on what charge, and sent to the guillotine. Friends were taken in the night. Hubert Robert was seized and flung into Saint Lazare, escaping death but by an accident. The state of misery and want amongst the artists and their wives and families at this time was pitiable. Fragonard gladly snatched at the invitation of an old friend of his family, Monsieur Maubert, to go to him at Grasse during these anxious times of the travail that had come upon France.