From her father she inherited a talent and taste for art, an amiable temper, a gift of wit; from her mother, a very handsome woman, she was dowered with a beauty for which she was as remarkable, and to which her many portraits of herself bear abundant witness. From very childhood she began to display the proofs of her inheritance--that happy disposition and that charm of manner that were to make her one of the most winsome personalities of her time. At the convent to which her parents sent her in her tenth year she fell to drawing on the margins of her books, filling them with little portrait-heads--an incessant habit that set her teachers grumbling at her lack of respect towards grammar and history. But to her delighted father the grumbles were matter for laughter; in him she found an ally who was hugely proud to discover in his girl an inheritor of his gifts. It is told of the fond father that the girl having taken to him one day a drawing, Vigee cried out exultantly: "You will be a painter, my girl, or there never was one!" Brought up, as the child was, in the world of artists, with the aims and ambitions and enthusiasms of artists for her very breath, she could not fail to find in such a world, besides the encouragement which was prodigally bestowed upon so young and promising a talent, the teaching needful to develop her powers. Amongst the artists who were on friendly terms with the girl's father, and of whom Doyen was the most intimate, was Davesne, a member and deputy professor of the Academy of St. Luke--he who afterwards claimed to have taught the little Elizabeth the elements of painting. Davesne's lessons were at best but few, and seem to have been limited to showing the eager child how to set a palette. The girl was in fact picking up the crumbs that fell from many tables; at any rate she showed astoundingly precocious industry and gifts, and was soon making quite a stir amongst the painter-folk, and becoming a source of pride to her father. Vigee, however, was only destined to guide and encourage the child towards the path; he died on the 9th of May 1768 from swallowing a fish bone. Little Elizabeth was but thirteen years old when this first great grief fell upon her. That was a strange world in which the child stood bewildered at the baffling cruelty of human destiny--this eighteenth-century France. The Pompadour had died in the child's ninth year; her dogged and persistent enemy, the Dauphin, the year after her; the neglected queen now followed the Pompadour to the grave in the June of this same year that left little Elizabeth fatherless.