In speaking, however, of Despréaux as “husband of Guimard,” it is not my intention to cast any slight on an estimable and, in his own time, well-known personality; but I do so merely that the reader will thereby be able to “place” her genial and accomplished husband, M. Despréaux to whom reference has already been made. He was born in 1748, five years after Mlle. Guimard, and was the son of a musician at the Paris Opera, where he himself was entered as a supernumerary-dancer in 1764. He made rapid progress in the art of his choice and won increasing reputation until, unhappily a wound in the foot completely closed his career as a “star,” and being a man of much theatrical experience and general culture, he then became a _maître de ballet_ and also gave dancing lessons. In 1789 he married Madeleine Guimard, whom he had long worshipped, and the two retired, as we know, at the opening of the Revolution to a cosy nest on the heights of Montmartre. So high, indeed, were they and so steep was the roadway approaching their dwelling, that the patrols refrained from troubling them, and save for financial losses, and rumours of revolution and distant guns, the couple remained untroubled by the red and raging Anarchy in the city stretched at their feet. Edmond de Goncourt makes out--on what authority I cannot fathom--that Despréaux was born in 1758, and _not_ 1748, thus making him out to be fifteen years the junior of Guimard when they married in 1789. As on other points he writes with such accuracy and copious wealth of detail one might suppose him to be correct, but seeing that Despréaux was undoubtedly entered a supernumerary-dancer in the Opera in 1764, and could hardly have been so at the age of six, one can only infer a slip of the pen, and that Goncourt really meant 1748, which would make the young male dancer’s age the likelier one of sixteen on appearing at Opera as a super, although he would, of course, have been training earlier. The question of age, however, is comparatively small. The thing that matters for us is that Despréaux, following modestly in the footsteps of his far greater predecessor Boileau-Despréaux (not an ancestor, by the way) had cultivated a taste for poetry, and during his retirement at Montmartre, divided his time between amusing his wife and friends with cutting silhouettes--at which he was an expert--and singing songs and parodies which he wrote himself. It seems an odd thing, does it not? that a man should be thus amusing himself and his friends--should be sufficiently undistracted to do so--while the greatest revolution then known to history should be in progress. But what could he do? He was a dancer, a singer, an artist; and could have had little weight had he meddled in the risky game of politics. As it was, perhaps, he chose the saner course, and when most were losing their heads he kept his own, and, as Richard Cœur de Lion had when in prison, wiled away the hours in song.