There is then every probability that their needs really were urgent. Guimard had never been charged with thrift; and Despréaux was a poet. Both started married life with a fair capital--all things henceforth held in common of course, according to the law--but fortune was against them, and though they might perhaps have weathered the storm had they been twenty years younger, it was almost inevitable that, their pensions gone, their capital diminishing, they should find the struggle growing yearly harder and their chances of replenishing their coffers less and less. De Goncourt gives what one cannot but feel is a too idyllic picture of the last years of the old couple, mainly on the basis of Jean’s poems (and _he_ was ever an optimist!) but he also gives us one true, interesting, and poignant glimpse of Madeleine as an old lady who, with her toy theatre, would, for the amusement of friends who chanced to drop in, go through the scenes of former splendour and with her frail fingers perform the steps that had made her famous in many a ballet of the past. Apparently Madeleine’s appeal to friends at Court must have had some success for Despréaux. In the following year, 1815, he was appointed inspector-general of the Court entertainments, and professor “_de danse et de grâces_” at the Conservatoire. But it is probable that only the last three or four years of their married life brought them any return of fortune. [Illustration: Madeleine Guimard (_From the painting by Fragonard_).] Madeleine died on May 4th, 1816, and, for years out of sight of a public which had long had other and less gracious objects for thought, her death passed almost unnoticed by the populace for whose amusement she had worked so loyally in her prime. Four years later, on March 26th, 1820, Despréaux followed her who had been his adored comrade for the greater portion of their lives. He had seen her, as little more than a child, win her earliest triumphs at the Opera, had seen her growing splendour as a woman of fashion, watched her through many years, danced with her, written for her and about her, seen her worst and best, and loved her well enough all through to wait till she would consent to marry him and with him retire from the stage they had so long adorned; and through the years, troublous for no fault of theirs, which followed their marriage, he cheered and consoled her for all she had relinquished, for the public worship all foregone, and for the neglect of the rising generation. He it was who, though their means can hardly have permitted it, instituted the little _déjeuners_ and supper-parties of kindred spirits, where songs were written and ballads sung in praise of love and wine and “la Gloire”--the one cry of the French Romanticists; all, one may well think, to cheer his beloved whose charm and goodness, poet himself, he never ceased to sing.