Gérard was created the perfect opposite, both physically and morally, of David. David was tall, with distorted features, rough, furious, cruel. Gérard was small, with a pleasing, regular physiognomy, delicate, soft, generous.... He would often tell how he was forced in those days (during the reign of terror) to deceive his master David, in order to preserve his own life. David, who in his zeal for reforming the world had become one of the most active members of the Committee of Safety, was incessantly busied in providing that bloody tribunal with familiars. Every one belonging to him, who desired his own preservation, was forced either to adopt republicanism in David's sense, or to evade it by some kind of deception. Gérard, although in perfect health, escaped the honor designed him by feigning sickness; and went about in public on crutches, which, however, he threw down the instant he knew himself safe from observation. Gérard's mother had died in 1792. Her brother, the painter's uncle, now a grown youth, took up the queer fancy of showing the Parisians the excellent manner in which the Romans are skilled in making confectioner's ices. The success of the _Café Tortoni_, on the _Boulevard des Italiens_, has now been for some fifty years known to all Europe. One of the children (Gérard) was dead, the youngest provided for elsewhere; and thus, after his mother's death, the young painter of two-and-twenty was left alone with his aunt, Mlle. Tortoni, who was but two years his junior. She became his wife. When relating the above, she would add, with _naïveté_, "At that time my nephew was in a manner forced to marry me, unless he chose to turn me out into the street. We were poor, but contented. Gérard's talent, as yet little known, and destitute of suitable means for its exercise, supported us, however, barely; and I continued to sew, darn, cook, carry water, and cut wood for our little household, as I had been wont to do before, when assisting his mother, my sister. In those days there was no marrying in the church, no priest, no banns. A few days after the death of my sister, we appeared in our poor work-a-day clothes, before the _maire_. He joined our hands, and then we became a couple." Some months were passed in this obscure poverty, until calmer times prevailed in Paris. Isabey had somehow become aware of the young painter's talent, and now urged him to exhibit a picture at the first Exhibition. Gérard produced the sketch of his _Bélisaire_;[5] but declared he had no means to paint it on a grand scale. Isabey hereupon assisted him; and, after the picture was finished and exhibited with success, procured him a purchaser, at the price of 100 Louis d'or.