When Guimard and Despréaux--comrades for at least twenty-five years--married, they settled down, on a fairly comfortable income, derived from their pensions and acquired property, at Montmartre and one of Jean’s poems gives a charming picture of their retreat in those troubled times. But during the Revolution, State finances were in disorder, and pensions were curtailed or discontinued and all the old favourites of the Opera were more or less involved in difficulties. In 1792, the city of Paris having confided the care of the Opera to Francoeur and Celerier, they nominated Despréaux director of the theatre and a member of the administrative committee, but this did not last. The following year Francoeur and Celerier were imprisoned, the actors were authorised to manage the theatre themselves and Despréaux--whose father, by the way, who had been leader of the orchestra at the Opera, killed himself the same year from despair at the general ruin around him--was allotted some part in the management of the public fêtes. In 1796--the year of the establishment of the Directory--Madeleine made a reappearance at a benefit given on January 23rd for the veteran performers at the Opera who had all suffered grievous losses in the Revolution. In 1807, three years after the crowning of Napoleon, by which time the national ferment had begun to settle down a little and the languished arts to take hope again, an Imperial decree dated July 29th, reduced the number of theatres in Paris to eight, and the Académie Impériale de Musique--as it was now called--had for Director, Picard, the comic poet, and for “inspecteur”--Despréaux. But these casual and precarious employments were not enough to remedy the losses that husband and wife sustained in the lean and fevered years from 1789, when they settled down in their high-perched nest overlooking all Paris in Montmartre until 1807, when Despréaux became again attached to the Opera, and that this employment too did not last we know from a letter which Madeleine wrote to a friend in 1814 imploring him to use his influence with people at Court to obtain from Louis XVIII some position for her husband, a letter in which she mentions the loss of their entire fortune owing to the Revolution and pleads that “_nos besoins sont bien urgents_.”