But with all the friendship of the great and the love of the populace and her six hundred and fifty guineas for the London season, Guimard’s financial position was not what it had been. The Soubise pension had been relinquished; that she received from the King in view of twenty years’ service at the Opera hardly sufficed her rather magnificent requirements, and the time came, in 1786, when she found it convenient to dispose of her mansion in the Chaussée d’Antin. This she did by arranging, without police sanction, a lottery, the tickets for which numbered two thousand five hundred, at a hundred and twenty livres each, a total sum of three hundred thousand livres. There was a fierce demand for the tickets, and twice the number could have been sold. The drawing took place in a salon of the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs, Rue Bergère, on the 1st of May, 1786, and Madeleine’s mansion with all its furniture went to the Comtesse du Lau, who, by the way, had only taken one ticket! It is worth noting now that Madeleine had reached the age of forty-three, that she had never been pretty and that she was marked with smallpox, with which--a current danger at those times--she had been attacked in 1783. To a clever and magnetic personality age matters not, nor do looks mean everything since in any case they are bound to alter in the course of a few decades; and even smallpox is not fatal to fascination. But these things, nevertheless, have to be admitted when one comes to years of discretion, and forty-three may be accounted such. One wonders whether Madeleine, who was eminently a woman of sense, began about now to face facts and the future, and whether the doing so, or else mere circumstances, political and social, impelled her to the next step in her career. People had wondered how Guimard had managed to keep exactly the same appearance for so many years. This was the secret! When she was twenty she had a portrait painted that was true to life and afterwards, for some twenty years or so, every morning she would study this and make herself up to resemble it exactly; and neither lover nor friend was ever admitted to this toilette. This was an ingenious idea, but it could not last for ever. It is all the more interesting then to note the next important incident in Guimard’s career. Ninon de l’Enclos, acting on the principle that it’s never too late to have a lover, flirted when she was ninety. Guimard gave up lovers when she was past forty and took a husband, a man, moreover, whom she had known for years. In 1789, Guimard retired from the Opera; in 1789 she married Jean Despréaux, dancer and poet; and in 1789 the gathering storms of Revolution broke and Paris, smitten first by famine, became for the next few years a hell, in which strangely enough, there was still a demand for entertainment lighter and less fervid than massacre.