Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

Since the days when all of the city of Paris, save a few mills, fortresses, and donjon-towers, was to be found on the Île de la Cité, the western end of that island has been the quarter of the gold and silver smiths. Here, in the olden times, when this part of the island was laid out in gardens and paths, the sellers of ornaments and metal vessels arranged their wares on the ground or in rude booths; later when peaked-roofed, latticed-faced buildings filled the space, these same venders opened their workshops in them; later still, when good King Henry IV. filled up this western end, built the Pont Neuf and put up the two fine façades of red brick and stone—mates for the arcades of the Place Royale—the same class continued here their trade. Even to-day, he who knows Paris thoroughly seeks the neighborhood of the Quai de l’Horloge and the Quai des Orfèvres for fine silverware and jewels.

Among the master engravers who in the latter part of the eighteenth century plied their trade in thisquarter was one Pierre Gatien Phlipon. His shop was in one of the houses of King Henry’s façade—a house still standing almost intact, although the majority of them have been replaced or rebuilt so as to be unrecognizable—that facing the King’s statue on the west and looking on the Quai de l’Horloge on the north.

M. Phlipon’s shop was in one of the best situations in Paris. The Pont Neuf, on which his house looked, was the real centre of the city. Here in those days loungers, gossips, recruiting agents, venders of all sorts, saltimbanques, quacks, men of fashion, women of pleasure, the high, the low, tout Paris, in short, surged back and forth across the bridge. So fashionable a promenade had the place become that Mercier, the eighteenth-century gossip, declared that when one wanted to meet a person in Paris all that was necessary to do was to promenade an hour a day on the Pont Neuf. If he did not find him, he might be sure he was not in the city.

Engraver by profession, M. Phlipon was also a painter and enameller. He employed several workmen in his shop and received many orders, but he had an itching for money-making which led him to sacrifice the artistic side of his profession to the commercial and to combine with his art a trade in jewelry and diamonds. We may suppose, in fact, that the reason M. Phlipon had removed his shop to the Pont Neuf, instead of remaining in the Rue de la Lanterne, now Rue de la Cité, near Notre Dame, where he lived until about 1755, was because he saw in the new location a better opportunity for carrying on trade.

As his sacrifice of art to commerce shows, M. Phlipon was not a particularly high-minded man. He was, in fact, an excellent type of what the small bourgeoisie of Paris was, and is to-day,—good-natured and vain, thrifty and selfish, slightly common in his tastes, not always agreeable to live with when crossed in his wishes, but on the whole a respectable man, devoted to his family, with too great regard for what his neighbors would say of him to do anything flagrantly vulgar, and too good a heart to be continually disagreeable.

His vanity made him fond of display, but it kept him in good company. If he condescended to trade, he never condescended to traders, but carefully preserved the relations with artists, painters, and sculptors which his rank as an engraver brought him. “He was not exactly a high-minded man,” said his daughter once, “but he had much of what one calls honor. He would have willingly taken more for a thing than it was worth, but he would have killed himself rather than not to have paid the price of what he had bought.” What M. Phlipon lacked in dignity of character and elevation of sentiments, Madame Phlipon supplied—a serene, high-minded woman, knowing no other life than that of her family, ambitious for nothing but duty. She is a perfect model for the gracious housewife in La mère laborieuse and Le Bénédicité of Chardin, and her face might well have served as the original for the exquisite pastel of the Louvre, Chardin’s wife.