She was a Mademoiselle Babuty, daughter of a bookseller on the Quai des Augustins, and entering the little shop to buy some books, Greuze became infatuated with her beauty. “White and slender as a lily, red as a rose,” is how Diderot describes her, and though she was past thirty when Greuze made her acquaintance, she must have been a remarkably pretty woman, with a round, smooth forehead, eyes full of _naïveté_ beneath long shadowing lashes, small nose, moist lips, delicate complexion. A sentimental, coquettish air redeemed what would otherwise have been an inane expression. In the portraits under her own name, and several pictures for which she posed, such as “La Mère Bien-aimée” and “La Philosophie endormie,” you see that if she was not the actual model, she was certainly the ideal that inspired most of Greuze’s best work. At first he had no intention of marrying her, and they had known each other two or three years before she practically compelled him to do so by threatening to kill herself if he did not make her his wife. It was a disastrous marriage. Lazy, greedy, extravagant, devoid of all moral sense, she soon got over the satisfaction the position of her husband gave her, and began to regard his work merely as a means to supply her caprices. When she had been married a few years she sent her two little girls away to school, and going from bad to worse, ended by filling the house with vulgar men, who made Greuze ridiculous. Her business training fitted her to keep the monetary accounts of the family, and when at length her husband was obliged to look into them to try to account for the disappearance of vast sums of money, he found she had been squandering them on her dissolute friends. The extent of her audacity can be judged by her accounting for the disappearance of 100,000 livres by saying she had invested it in a ship which had gone down at sea, and she refused to give the name of the vessel or captain. Of all that freedom of mind and internal peace so important to all successful work, but supremely so to the artist whose creations are to be strong, Greuze knew nothing. Petty discussions, foolish quarrels, then grievous wrongs and personal violences, made up the background of his life, and it is astonishing that the trials of man and husband did not sap the strength of the artist. You would wonder why he supported it all so long did you not know that the artistic temperament finds the most important part of its life in its work, and falls an easy prey to imposition in most things outside it. Besides, at first he loved her very sincerely, and she was the mother of his two daughters. At length, when cartoons were printed ridiculing her lightness, and her husband for supporting it, and her behaviour was instrumental in his having to resign his _logement_ in the Louvre, even Greuze’s patience gave way, and in 1785 a deed of separation enabled him to get rid of her.