The Pompadour had gathered about her, as the beautiful Madame d'Etioles, the supreme wits and artists and thinkers of her day; Voltaire and Boucher and Latour and the rest were her friends, and the new thought that was being born in France was nursed in her drawing-rooms. As the Pompadour she kept up her friendships. She was prodigal in her encouragement of the arts, in the furnishment of her own and the king's palaces and castles. And it was in the exercise and indulgence of her better qualities that she brought out the genius and encouraged to fullest achievement the art of Boucher, and of the great painters of her time. So Boucher brought to its full blossom the art that Watteau had created--the picture of "Fêtes galentès"--and added to the artistic achievement of France the Pastorals wherein Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses dally in pleasant landscapes, and the Venus-pieces wherein Cupids flutter and romp--a world of elegance and charm presided over by the Goddess of Love. II ROME All this was but Paris-gossip amidst the olive-trees and steep streets of far-away Grasse, where the large-headed, small-bodied lad was idling through his fifteen summers, living and breathing the beauty of the pleasant land of romance that bred him, when, like bolt from the blue, fell the news upon him that his father, tearing aside the fabric of the lad's dreams, had articled him as junior clerk to a notary. But the French middle-class ideal of respectability meant no heaven for this youth's goal, no ultimate aim for his ambition. He idled his master into despair; "wasting his time" on paint-pots and pencil-scribblings until that honest man himself advised that the lad should be allowed to follow his bent. So it came about--'twas in that year of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the year that saw the Pompadour come to supreme power (she had been for three years the king's acknowledged mistress)--the youth's mother, with all a French mother's shrewdness and common-sense, gathered together the sixteen-year-old lad's sketches, and bundled off with him in a diligence to Paris. Arrived in Paris she sought out the greatest painter of the day, and burst with the shy youth into the studio of the dandified favourite artist of the king's majesty, Pompadour's Boucher--large-hearted, generous, much-sinning, world-famed Boucher, then at the very summit of his career--he was at that time living in the Rue Grenelle-Saint-Honoré, which he was about to leave, and in which Fragonard in his old age was destined to end his days.