Some 18th-century cosmetics

A little more on 18th-century cosmetics........


Wearing make-up

Looking pretty despite the rouge......

Marie-Josèphe de Saxe
Unknown artist, Versailles

The heavy white make-up and painted red cheeks of 18th century French aristocrats is, to some extent, a caricature reinforced by film and theatre. Highly exaggerated make-up of this sort was associated primarily with the Court, with Baroque overtones of both artifice and sexual freedom (see the article by Dominique Paquet)  Louis XV decreed that when his daughters came of age they should wear rouge - a custom also imposed upon the foreign born Dauphines, Marie-Josèphe de Saxe and Marie-Antoinette. Make-up functioned in this way as a mark of aristocratic distinction - though niceties easily became muddied under the competing demands of social mobility, blossoming consumerism and changing fashions.  

Make-up was, of course, always intended to enhance the complexion and beautify as well as serve as social statement.  Even early in the century, men (and women) were not immune to the allure of natural beauty.  Significantly, it was said that Madame de Pompadour's heavy make up - defiantly on show in Boucher's famous portrait "à la toilette" -  was a departure from her former more bourgeois habits when she had used only a hint of rouge to highlight her famously creamy white complexion and sparkling eyes. (See Melissa Hyde, p.458).  

Boucher, Madame de Pompadour at her toilette, 1758
Fogg Museum Harvard..

As Morag Martin has demonstrated, the period saw considerable changes both in social conditions, moral attitudes towards cosmetics and commercial context, with the main trend the move towards more simple fashions and a "natural" look by the 1780s. The stark white skin, brilliant red cheeks and black silk patches of Versailles were replaced by the desire for a naturally flushed skin and an open, honest countenance free from artifice.   

A variety of evidence -  beauty manuals and medical treatises, advertisements in journals (which first appear in the 1750s), stories, anecdotes, diaries - testifies to a burgeoning cosmetics industry.  By the second half of the century the emphasis was definitely on  health and skin condition:  rouge to give the impression of healthy complexion;  creams and pomades to whiten and soften the skin, scented waters to care it.  Shop-bought cosmetics also became readily available to a much wider spectrum of women.


Definitions - "Parfum" "Cosmétique" "Fard"

Again according to  Morag Martin,  the literature used the term "Cosmétique" for both makeup and creams, but as distinct from scents and parfumerie.   A subcategory was defined as "fard" - face paint to hide imperfections and give the illusion of colour.  The latter divided into "blanc" and "rouge".


The basics - toilet waters and pomades

In fact, especially when it came to home prepared products, the strict distinction between fragrance and cosmetics is a little artificial. Toilet waters, though primarily employed for their scent, were used in a variety of preparations and, in an age where bathing facilities were scare and suspect, deemed to have health-giving properties in their own right.  Here is an alcohol-based "Hungary water" among a number of recipes from a traditional grimoire,  Le Petit Albert.
http://marie-antoinettequeenoffrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/18th-century-cosmetic-recipes.html#.UsKCuvRdUrU

The  second ubiquitous component of cosmetics was pomatum or pomade  -  a thick scented cream, usually containing water, animal fat, almond oil or beeswax and apples. Its primary function was to dress hair, but it was also used as basis of face creams and cleansers that could be applied using the fingers. It could be prepared at home and, by the 1740s, bought in a profusion of different varieties, perfumed with lemon, citron and bergamot as well as the more traditional orange and jasmine. Later in the century it was often sold in the form of solid sticks.


Face paint and whiteners

The dominant aesthetic demanded whiteness of skin to signal respectability and class.  Women took elaborate precautions to shield their skin from the sun.  However the application of heavy make-up came to seem more respectable than naturally white skin. White make-up was none too healthy because predominantly made with metal based compounds, the most expensive of which was ceruse or white chalk of lead (lead carbonate);  bismuth compounds or aluminium sulphate (alum) were also widely used. These were finely powered then blended with oils. 

According to Morag Martin, although "blanc" was "the most suspect cosmetic of all due to its noxious ingredients and ability to mask the wearer's true self", many women justified it as a means to cover blemishes or smallpox scars.  Nonetheless, Catherine Lanoë  - surveyed 15 different beauty manuals, published between 1541 and 1782  -  was surprised to find that recipes using ceruse did not refer to "fard", the term which usually implied heavy "paint".  It might be that that simple white paint or powder was too commonplace to mention, or maybe the term attracted too much opprobrium to be used comfortably.   Surviving recipes, however, often feature creams and washes to whiten the complexion rather than the solid mask of  foundation often assumed in modern recreations.  

The effect was a translucent pallor rather than a layer of opaque white pigment;  some at least of the preparations were certainly intended to be applied in the evening and worn overnight rather than as day make-up.  Earliest recipes emphasised preparations that could be "scrubbed" into the skin to lessen blemishes but in the 18th century the general emphasis was on enhanced whiteness.  By the later part of the century, whilst the dominant white aesthetic remained, washes were prescribed more often, usually as part of the morning toilette. This suggests that a more prominent part was now played by water and washing in beauty routines.


Here are some examples:

1. "Spanish white"
From "Madame Isis":  http://madameisistoilette.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/spanish-white.html
Recreated and worn by Madame Isis:
 http://madameisistoilette.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/making-spanish-white-face-paint.html
This recipe is from the text Abdeker, Or the Art of Preserving Beauty which was directed primarily at perfumers. "Spanish white" is "magistery of bismuth" [a white precipitate of bismuth subnitrate] which in this instance is  blended with a cosmetic oil ("Oil of Ben").  Abdeker states that,  "If it be dissolv'd in Flower-de-Luce Water, it will whiten the face", which is difficult to interpret:   is it just that the pigment could be mixed with toilet water and used as a whitening wash or was it that the cosmetic was pre-prepared with oil for texture and translucency, then applied with the addition of water? Madame Isis had trouble blending with water, but using it neat produced something rather shiny and unpleasantly sticky.

2. An "excellent cosmetic for the face"
http://madameisistoilette.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/excellent-cosmetic-for-face.html
Again from Abdeker. This preparation contains Hartshorn, ceruse, rice powder and Arabic gum, and this time the recipe clearly stipulates dissolving the ingredients in rose-water and using as a wash.

3. Nun's cream
http://madameisistoilette.blogspot.se/2012/09/hannah-glasse-on-pearls.html
From an English source, Hannah Glasse, The art of cooking (1747)
This one is blended with a pomade rather than the water-based washes suggested by Abdeker, the primary ingredient being "pearl-powder" (which could mean bismuth rather than actual pearls). This created a whitening cream.

4. "White paint" according to a German source
http://marquise.de/en/1700/kosmetik_3.shtml
This recipe is clearer; powdered white pigment is mixed with tragacanth water, a kind of gum prepared from a root. It can then be stored in a dried form and mixed with a pomade to actually apply.  The result is a white shiny foundation cream to which rouge easily adheres.

"When the white powder is covered with traganth (?tragacanth) water, stir them well through and through with a glass spoon until it has become a thick paste, and spread it onto a piece of white paper which has been strewn with the white paint before. Separate small amounts of the size of a pea from it, then dry them in a place that is protected from dust and keep them in a box. In order to use them, do as follows. Firstly, prepare a good pomade. Now take the dried pellets of white paint, put some in a small porcelain bowl, pulverize them with a glass spoon and add of the pomade, and mix it well. When you need it, spread some of it evenly on the face, and wipe any surplus away with blotting-paper. This will make the face shiny and enables it to receive the red paint."


Rouges

Red pigment was derived from minerals such as cinnabar (mercuric sulphide, called vermillion) or red lead.  It could also be made, rather more safely and inexpensively, from vegetable matter, such as safflowers (catharme), saffron, gum benzoin (wood resin), sandalwood, and brazilwood.  One of the most expensive dyes was carmine made from cochineal insects found in Latin America.  Dyes were originally combined with vinegar or lemon, precipitated on powder using alum, and then scented with flowers.  They could then be combined with a pomade and rubbed in or, alternatively, mixed with rose water or oil and applied using a brush (as Madame de Pompadour does in the Boucher portrait). Rouge could also be made au crépon, dying a cloth or paper with cochineal that could be moistened and rubbed on the face.  

In the mid century perfumers started selling rouge pre-prepared in pots - by 1781 it is reckoned that Frenchwomen used about two millions pots a year! (?Crickey - not sure where I got that statistic from....) and rouge - called in the Encyclopédie "the terrible vermilion" - was an accessory of almost every woman's dressing table. Thus Charles-Nicolas Cochin, writing about 1750:

"It is well known that rouge is nothing more than the mark of rank or wealth, because it cannot be supposed that anyone has thought to become more beautiful with this terrible crimson patch. It is surprising that such distinction has been attached to a colour so common and inexpensive that even the lowliest grisettes can make this expenditure as abundantly as a person of the highest birth."

Not all men were so hostile; according to Casanova rouge spelled opportunity, an ersatz flush to the cheeks signalling an invitation to love and a promise of erotic abandon (see Melissa Hyde, p.458)

Preparations:

1. Spanish red and carmine red 
http://marquise.de/en/1700/kosmetik_3.shtml
These recipes from the German give details of how to create the base red dyes from Turkish safflower and powdered cochineal.

2. An economical rouge 
 http://madameisistoilette.blogspot.se/2012/10/an-economical-rouge.html 
Another recipe posted by Madame Isis, this time from a 1797 manual. This is really just some advice on how to  apply shop-bought carmine using a pomade:

"Fine Carmine, pulverized and prepared for for this purpose [rouge], is without doubt the best of all Paints, and which the Ladies ought to adopt. In order to use it in an agreeable and frugal manner, procure some fine pomatum, without scent, made with the fat of pork and white wax; take about the bigness of a pea of this pomatum, and lay it upon a piece of white paper; then with the end of a tooth-pick add to it about the bigness of a pin's head of Carmine— mix it gently with your finger, and when you have produced the tone you wish, rub in it a little compressed cotton, and pass it on the face, till the Paint is quite spread and it no longer feels greasy.
Ladies have nothing to fear from this economical Rouge—it neither injures the health or skin, and imitates perfectly the natural colour."
Recreated by Madame Isis, http://madameisistoilette.blogspot.se/2013/01/making-and-wearing-nuns-cream-and.html

2. French Rouge,—Five Shillings per Pot.
 Another recipe from Hannah Glasse.  Rather than blending with a pomade, this suggests adding the carmine to hair powder.  This is quite interesting as face powder per se features very infrequently in these preparations.
http://madameisistoilette.blogspot.se/2012/09/french-rougefive-shillings-per-pot.html

3 . Another rouge for the face
http://madameisistoilette.blogspot.se/2012/08/another-rouge-for-face.html
From the Toilet of Flora (1771)  This one uses brazilwood shavings, alum and red wine to create a dye that can just be rubbed in.

References

Cosmetic ingredients and recipes 

Madame Isis' toilette.  This is a great blog from someone who recreates 18th-century costumes and cosmetics.
http://madameisistoilette.blogspot.co.uk/p/an-incomplete-list-of-ingredients-used.html

"Assistants of beauty : cosmetics in the Rococo and Empire eras". [In  La Couturière Parisienne, blog]
Recipes from:  Johann Bartholomäus Trommdorff. Kallopistria, oder die Kunst der Toilette für die elegante Welt. Erfurt 1805. http://marquise.de/en/1700/kosmetik.shtml 

18th century cosmetic recipes from Le petit Albert
http://marie-antoinettequeenoffrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/18th-century-cosmetic-recipes.html#.UsKCuvRdUrU


General works: 

Melissa HYDE, The "Makeup" of the Marquise: Boucher's portrait of Pompadour at her toilette" The Art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 3, (Sep., 2000), pp. 453-475.  
http://fsunw9.ferris.edu/~norcrosa/18thcWebsite/articles/Boucher.pdf

Catherine LANOË, "Céruse et cosmétiques sous l’Ancien Régime, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles" [Paper, published 2003]

http://www.cnrs.fr/cw/dossiers/doschim/decouv/couleurs/lanoe.pdf

_____, Extract from La poudre et le fard  (2008) :
https://assets.edenlivres.fr/assets/publications/28839/medias/la-poudre-et-le-fard-extrait.epub

Morag MARTIN, Selling beauty: cosmetics, commerce, and French society, 1750–1830 (2009) [Extracts available on Google Books]

Dominique  PAQUET ''Le fard cache les nuits de folies'' L'EXPRESS - Histoire de la beauté: 4. Les XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles.  

http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/4-les-xviie-et-xviiie-siecles_818939.html

Make-up the 18th century way?

Fancy a new look for 2014?   Or is it 1714?   In this handy video clip, make-up expert  Alice Moulinet  advises on how to achieve the perfect maquillage for the 18th-century party season...........

1. You will need:  White foundation, loose white powder,  dark red paint for lips, red blusher. Brushes for powder, foundation and blusher, and for lips and eyeliner.  Eyeliner is used to add the characteristic 18th century "beauty spot". ("la mouche")

2.  For the face:  Use generous amounts of make up.  Take a quantity of white foundation in your hand and apply with the aid of a brush. Use a tapping motion to apply thickly.  Do not hesitate to load your brush as foundation was applied very thickly in the 18th century.  But be careful not to get it in your eyebrows.  Smooth it down and take the edges right up to the roots of your hair using the smallest brush. Now apply the powder.  Then take the red blusher and apply to your cheeks. Use the correct brush and make circular movements in such a way that the rouge remains thick and well-defined.

3.To emphasise the lips:  Take the dark red lip colour and apply several layers using the special brush.  The lips must be well covered to preserve the heavily made-up effect.

4. To finish: apply a beauty spot in the place of your choice, using a small quantity of eye-liner on a fine brush.  Find a suitable spot on your face or cleavage - positioning is significant and symbolic.  Near the eye reflects a passionate woman.  On the lip, a frivolous woman or a coquette.  On the nose, daring and cheeky.  On the forehead, proud.  On the cheek, amorous. On the chest generous and warmhearted.   There is an option for every personality; it is up to you to decide!

http://www.minutefacile.com/beaute-mode/soin-du-visage-et-maquillage/8268-faire-un-maquillage-du-18e-si-cle/#Version-texte

Not just a Revolution for the young.....

A National Guardsman and his wife by Rémy-Furcy Descarsin (1746-1793)
73cm x 90.5 cm.  Oil.
Signed "Descarsin, painter to Monsieur, brother of the King 1791"
Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille

This lovely painting was acquired by the Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille in 2004, having recently come up for public auction.  A piece of political propaganda certainly, but as an unpatronising portait of two ordinary people, it shows the legacy of the Revolution at its best.

Of the painter, Rémy-Furcy Descarsin,  little is known.  He was active in Paris and failed to gain entry to the Academy of Painting in 1789 when he submitted a self-portrait. Apparently he had two musical sisters.  He styled himself painter to the comte de Provence, dating the painting  to before the latter's successful flight from Paris in June 1791.  The title is a bit puzzling; clearly the man is too old to be an active National Guardsman. In fact the uniform is purely symbolic. The subjects were an old couple from Nantes, who were the recipients of charitable attention from the local Jacobins.  Here is a contemporary account from the Annales Nantaises : 

2nd February 1791
A married couple, aged more than a hundred ("plus que centenaires") from the former diocese of Angers, named René Dogereau or Degro, and Perrine Trouillard, were living near the former Hermitage, in a state of abandonment and distress.  The Amis de la Constitution, who had heard about them though their inquiries after recommendations for public charity, awarded to these old people a pension which would continue to to be paid to whichever of the two remained living.  To give them an idea of the Revolution, which they could not expect to enjoy for long, they dressed them up in clothes in the three national colours.  The Compagnie des Adolescents then fetched them and took them to the Theatre, to performances of The Family Supper  and The Three Farmers which were put on in their benefit.  Dogereau, had been a wine grower, a ferryman and finally a caulker of boats.  He died a short time ago but his wife is still alive and still has the use of her senses. p.581-582.

References
Annales Nantaises,by  Michel Guimar, published in Year III of the Republic http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7k8TAAAAQAAJ&q=p.158#v=onepage&q=dogereau&f=false

For a discussion of the painting, see : http://www.lafoliedix-huitieme.eu/peinture/garde-national-femme-t3682.html

Fouquier-Tinville at Christmas

Légendes de Noël 

A very merry Christmas!

The following is an abridged translation of a story from G. Lenotre's Légendes de Noël, a series of Christmas tales set in the Revolution and Empire, first published in 1910.

Lenotre (Louis Léon Théodore Gosselin) was a great historian and unusual for his time in his willingness to extend sympathies to both sides of the Revolutionary struggle. In this story, he finds humanity in one of the most hated figures of the Terror, the Public Prosecutor Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville.

I have been unable to trace the comte de Courville, but Lenotre's view of Fouquier-Tinville is certainly based on details fully documented elsewhere in his work. Accurate too is the description of Séraphin's famous silhouette theatre which operated in the Palais-Royal, to patriotic enthusiasm, throughout the darkest days of the Revolution.




In the time of the Terror, a passerby at night who walked along the quai de l’Horloge, under the walls of the Palais de Justice, would quicken his step and, take care, out of instinct, not to raise his head.  In one of the windows next to the towers of the Conciergerie, a light burned from dawn to dusk which, as far as it could be seen, made the people of Paris tremble in fear.

 This light illuminated the cell where worked, day and night, Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor, the feared magistrate who furnished the Revolutionary Tribunal with its required quota of accused and the guillotine with its daily harvest of heads. The life of this man, whose tragic name weighed over Paris like the legendary sword over the head of Damocles, was one of crushing labour.  He slept three or four hours a day, rarely more.  For twenty hours at a stretch, he prepared the work of the death-machine, a colossal task which he would entrust to no-one else.

Stop press: Robespierre reconstructed!

What do you know?!  Robespierre and his death mask have made the headlines!  Mulhouse-based facial reconstruction expert, Philippe Froesch used advanced FBI techniques to create this image from a plaster copy of the Tussaud mask, now in the Museum of Natural History in Aix-en-Provence. 

A monument in honour of the Bourbons

Earlier this year I went to an exhibition at the Sir John Soane Museum, "Northern Vision: Master Drawings from the Tchoban Foundation" (June-September 2013).  There were all sorts of great architectural fantasies - the peach was a design for a truly mega 1930s Palace of Soviets.  Also included were a couple of noteworthy 18th-century French confections. The first is a drawing submitted for the 1772 Grand Prix of the Academy of Architecture by Louis-Jean Desprez (1743-1804) for a "Monument in honour of the Bourbons":  unsurprisingly it didn't win. (How the Revolutionaries would have enjoyed tearing this down if it had ever been built!)

Commemorative Monument in Honour of the Bourbons 1772
Pen, Indian ink, brown ink, applied to a sketch in black chalk

Signed Desprez invenit on the base, in pen and brown ink

Copyright: Tchoban Foundation

Image courtesy of Sir John Soane Museum

"This highly complex drawing was produced by Desprez for the 1772 Grand Prix of the French Academy of Architecture. Here, he has designed a monument based on a circular temple or tholos. The architecture is richly adorned with symbols and allegorical statues evocative of the Bourbon dynasty, including fleur-de lis, suns, Gallicroosters and the intertwined initials ‘L’ and ‘H’ representing the current Bourbon monarch Louis XVI and the founder of the dynasty Henri IV.
The capitals of the temple’s columns are based on those of the ‘French Order’ developed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and used in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Perhaps because of this overly complex decorative scheme,Desprez failed to win the Grand Prix with this submission. He left France in 1784 to enter the service of the King of Sweden, Gustave III."

The second offering is a Hercules by Ennemond Alexandre Petitot (1727-1801) intended to adorn the Napoleonic Cisalpine Republic.  It is probably as well that this neo-classical delight never made it past the drawingboard - it would have been 83 feet tall!

 Hercules of Gaul, or the Victorious French People

in the image of Hercules (1800-01);
Ennemond Alexandre Petitot (1727-1801).
Copyright: Tchoban Foundation.

Image courtesy of Sir John Soane Museum.

"Although born and trained as an architect in France, Petitot worked mainly in Italy. Having won the Grand Prix of the Academy of Architecture in 1745, at the age of eighteen, he took up a residency in Rome the following year, where he joined the ranks of French ‘Piranesians’, such as Clérisseau, Vien, Challe and Le Lorrain. In 1753 he entered the service of the Duke of Parma and founded the Academy of Fine Arts there. This drawing probably relates to a plan for a new district of Milan, which between 1797 and 1802 was the capital of the Cisalpine Republic – a short-lived French client state founded byNapoleon. Hercules of Gaul was a particularly popular subject during the French Revolution. Petitot based his figure on a well-known antique statue but with the addition of the French cockerel."

Notice and notes from the Exhibition: 
http://www.soane.org/exhibitions/northern-vision-master-drawings-from-the-tchoban-foundation

Aviary of Madame Helvétius

The Aviary of Madame Helvetius is a mawkishly sentimental little fable published in 1809 as part of a set of "Instructional narratives" for little girls, by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly (1763-1842), who is remembered today chiefly as the librettist of Beethoven's Fidelio. In the story, a tame pigeon is sent to Madame bearing an anonymous begging letter; she trustingly obliges and has her money returned in due course, to outpourings of uplifting emotion, by a pretty member  of the "deserving poor" .  As far as I know Bouilly had no personal connection and is merely echoing Madame H's well-known kindness and fondness for birds. 

Last glimpses of Madame Helvétius

The house in Auteuil

Plaque on the site of the house

There are no surviving pictures of Madame Helvétius's house, then 24 Grande rue d’Auteuil, a country property nestling close to the Bois de Bologne between the royal Château of Coq (now demolished)  and the village of Auteuil.  The immense estate of the comtesse du Boufflers - now the exclusive Villa Montmorency compound, home to politicians and film stars -  was just over the way.

The property was described in the deeds of sale as consisting of the house, which bordered the road, and a small pavilion, situated at the bottom of a park of two arpents in length.(An "arpent" was 78 yards, so, depending on width, we are envisaging an acre or two).

Built in about 1720, the main body of the house was flanked by two straight wings and included an elegant peristyle.  A pretty iron gate led onto a courtyard containing a well and aviaries for Madame's many birds. 

Antoine Guillois, writing in 1894, gives a detailed description of the interior culled from the memoirs of Ambroise Firmin-Didot and other local residents who were children at the time. Visitors entering by the coach entrance, found themselves on the ground floor where there was a kitchen, larder and greenhouse and a bathroom with a window onto the road. On the first floor, reached via a fine wrought iron staircase, was a spacious dining room with views onto both the road and courtyard, a grand salon which could accommodate up to fifty people, and two smaller reception rooms. 

 Guillois's youthful observers seemed to have been oddly preoccupied with details of furnishings - in the dining room: oak sideboard, table and side tables, five cane armchairs, chair covered with tapestry, gilded console and a  marble  basin mounted on the wall;  in the mirrored salon:  chiffonier with marble top, tables, settees with feather cushions and a whole assortment of other chairs and sofas upholstered in blue and white, plus a daybed with a blue damask cover; on the fireplace an enormous display of flowers in a blue porcelain bowl.

 Across from the salon, the mistress's bedroom boasted more fine quality furniture and hangings of blue velvet and taffeta.  French window gave out onto the terrace which commanded a view of the garden and which was shaded by a magnificent acacia with profuse blossom.  It was here every morning that Madame would come to feed the birds. Rhododendrons, hortensias, roses and other plants flourished under the care of her chief gardener Richard. The pavilion in which La Roche and Cabanis lodged was approached by an avenue of lime trees and consisted of two bedrooms, a dining room and kitchen plus a salon with a central dome. There was also a small vegetable garden where the various children who frequented the house were given their own little plots to tend.

Franklin relics from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
The Dresden china cups and saucers were a present from Madame Helvetius.
According to Guillois, Madame's linen and tablewhere were those of a "modest bourgeoise"

Madame Helvétius during the Revolution

In the dying years of the Ancien Régime, the void at Auteuil left by Franklin's departure was filled by a new generation of habitués, the poet Antoine Roucher, author of a vast and almost unreadable poem The Months, André Chenier, an intimate friend of Cabanis, Volney, the liberal nobles Destutt de Tracy and  Eymar, and Condorcet, who in early 1789 brought his young wife to be presented to Madame.  These men greeted the  bright dawn of Revolution with uniform enthusiasm, with the exception only of the abbé Morellet, who, as a consequence, broke with Cabanis and La Roche and  moved out with his furniture to a house in the valley of Montmorency at Cernay.  Volney, Sieyès, Chamfort and La Chaise, the deputy for Brivé, now took up almost permanent residence.  Cabanis, arriving from Paris on 15th July, was introduced to Mirabeau and became his close collaborator.

In the Revolution's first years of liberal promise, the gentle abbé La Roche, true to his antique exemplars, abandoned his leisured life of book collecting to enter the public arena. He was elected mayor of Auteuil ("the fat Mayor" quipped Cabanis) and later, though never having exercised ecclesiastical functions, took on the role of constitutional priest to protect the refractory incumbant and his flock.  Both he and Cabanis featured prominently in a civic festival at Auteuil on 3 July 1791 in which a stone from the Bastille was installed in the Church (in which Madame's property entitled her to a private pew). It was La Roche who pronounced the opening discourse inviting the inhabitants of the village to "live as brothers and remain united to resist the chains of slavery." 

The Church of Notre-Dame, Auteuil, rebuilt in the late 19th century

A year later, on 5 August 1792, a second fête inaugurated, on a piece of ground next to Madame Helvétius's house, a new Town Hall in the style of a Grecian temple, containing busts of Rousseau, Voltaire, Franklin, Helvétius himself and Mirabeau.  In the list of patriotic contributions Madame pledged 4,500 livres; Cabanis 1,200 and La Roche 900. André Chenier meanwhile saw his play Charles IX performed to acclaim before an audience which included Mirabeau, Danton, Desmoulins and Fabre d'Eglantine.  Cabanis attended the dying Mirabeau as his physician but still returned faithfully to Madame Helvétius, herself ill and anxious if he was absent. He and La Roche now allied themselves closely with Condorcet, who in September 1792 established himself nearby at 2 Grande rue.  

Marc Louis Arlaud,
 Portrait of Pierre-Jean-Georges
Cabanis
 (1757-1808)

The Terror brought proscription and arrest.  Roucher was imprisoned, as were Chamfort, Ginguené and Volney, and Condorcet was forced into hiding. In Auteuil itself Destutt de Tracy and the abbé La Roche were both detained, La Roche arrested in November 1793 and held first in the Abbaye, then in the Carmes prison and released only after the death of Robespierre.  D'Andlau, Madame Helvétius's son-in-law, was briefly arrested and subsequently emigrated, although her daughters were protected, declared daughters of the Nation, in memory of their father. 

 Although personally safe, the elderly lady was deeply affected by events of the Terror and talked constantly of her friends that had disappeared and that she hoped to see again.  On one occasion, obliged to go to Paris to visit her daughter who was sick, she fainted on the Place de la Revolution. Cabanis dedicated his Mélanges de littérature to her, composed, he said, to distract her from the mournful preoccupations left by the terrible experience of the Revolution. 

At the height of the Terror, she had apparently hidden a considerable amount of money in the park, but forgotten its whereabouts. The sale deeds carried a clause stipulating what to do if it was ever recovered (which it never was).

After Thermidor  the life of the salon recovered, and its surviving members  -   Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Volney, Garat, Ginguené, Daunou - formed the core of the so-called "Idéologues",  leading lights in the reconstruction of intellectual institutions under the Directory and Empire. In May 1795 Cabanis married Charlotte-Felicité de Grouchy, sister of Madame Condorcet and the couple came to live in the pavillion.  Bonaparte himself visited and commented on the smallness of the park, to which Madame Helvétius famously replied,  "You cannot know General, how much happiness is to be found in three arpents of land".


Death and burial

"Notre Dame d'Auteuil" died on 13th August 1800 at the age of 81. She had retained her habit of rising early and had contracted a chest infection at the end of winter, which neither Cabanis nor his colleague Pierre de Roussel could cure.  In her final days, she had with her Cabanis, his wife and two daughters, La Roche and Jean-Antoine-Cauvin Gallois, the Tribune and friend of Cabanis, who had lived with her since 1793.  According to her wishes she was buried at the end of her park in a vault constructed on the right side of the pavillon. Helen Maria Williams recalled that "she always spoke with calmness of death, and pointed out to me the spot in her garden where her remains were to be deposited".  Her burial, without formal religious ceremony, is described by her grandson Jean-Antoine-Claude-Adrien de Mun in a letter to  Mme de Staël, dated 31st August 1800; he  mentions neither the vault nor the the pavillion, but confirms that the coffin was placed in a tomb dug in her garden in accordance with her wishes.

Tomb of Madame Helvétius, who lies next
 to heart of Cabanis in the Auteuil cemetery

Although she left the property to her granddaughters Madame willed enjoyment of the house to Cabanis and La Roche in the hope that they would continue to live there and watch over her ashes.  This was not to be. The latter, a member of the corps législatif since 1799 retired to Orville in the Pas-de-Calais in 1803 where he died in 1806. Cabanis unexpectedly died in May 1808, his body transported to the Pantheon but his heart buried in the garden next to Madame Helvétius. In 1817, when the property left the family definitively, her remains were transferred to the nearby cemetery. After a first monument was destroyed in the bombardment of 1871, it was not until 1892 that a replacement tombstone was finally erected by public subscription.

In modern Paris, no trace survives of the house.  An anonymous apartment block occupies the site, now 59 rue d'Auteuil

59 rue d'Auteuil today

"Drama of 59 rue d'Auteuil"

École Normale Israelite
 Orientale.
which occupied the site
 from the 1870s.

The property was rented from 1808 by Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, the American-born physicist, who had married Lavoisier's widow. It then changed hands several times before being bought in 1854 by Prince Pierre-Napoléon Bonaparte, whose father Lucien Bonaparte had once frequented Madame's salon; the "drama of 59 rue d'Auteuil" brought brief notoriety when Bonaparte was challenged to a duel and, refusing, short dead his opponent's emissary.  During the Commune the Fédérés briefly established a headquarters in the house but, learning that it had belonged to Bonaparte, decided to burn it down instead.  In July 1877 the small pavilion used by Morellet and Cabanis was also demolished.  In latter times the site was occupied by the École Normale Israelite Orientale.


References

Antoine Guillois, Le salon de  Mme Helvétius (1892)
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24820536M/Le_salon_de_Madame_Helv%C3%A9tius
M. Guillois was the great-grandson of Antoine Roucher and seems to be the main source of  factual information on day-to-day life chez Madame Helvétius.

Helen Maria Williams, "Death of Madame Helvétius" in Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic, Vol. 2 (1801) [Available on Google Books]
.
Guy de la Prade, L'illustre société d'Auteuil 1772-1830, ou, La fascination de la liberté (1989)
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NNRwIR-h7ZMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
[Free extracts on Google Books include a good chapter on the Revolution in Auteuil]

Details of 59 rue d'Auteuil in a website devoted to the 16th arrondissement :
http://mapage.noos.fr/hubert.demory/maison-helvetius.htm

The cemetery at Auteuil: 
http://www.landrucimetieres.fr/spip/spip.php?article1544  






Note of 23/09/2015

I recently came across this anonymous terracotta bust of Mme Helvétius.  It was Lot 48 in the sale of the Collection Paul Rousseau held in Toulon on 24 March 2012.
http://www.liveauctioneers.com/catalog/
28854_historical-souvenirs-about-french-revolution/page1?rows=20