Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

to have begun, as it did for so many others, at Lenoir’s museum, where he sketched the tombs
before the collection was dismantled and he continued to know Lenoir.
Figure 32 The Intervention of the Sabine Women, by Jacques-Louis David, 1796-99
In the 1790s Langlois also played an almost literally pivotal role in David’s own turn
away from revolutionary ideals in the aftermath of Thermidor towards a more conciliatory
political stance. The change of direction was signalled in David’s art by The Intervention of the
Sabine Women of 1796-99 [fig: 32]. Langlois modelled for Romulus, the central male figure in
the picture, frozen forever in a moment of crisis between action and suffering. It is a resonant
image for the similar painful ambiguity seems to have run through much of his life. There were
in him it was said ‘deux temperaments bien distincts’ [two quite different temperaments]. 152
These were described by contemporaries in terms of the classical and romantic strains that met,
or as some thought, clashed, in his art. The duality goes further, however, extending to a deep
ambivalence that runs through all his writings. Langlois is at times scrupulously factual, evincing
contempt for the credulity of the past. His discussion of the supposed tomb of the Enervés of
Jumièges, for example, extends none of the imaginative sympathy for a synthesis of myth and
material that might be expected from an aficionado of Lenoir’s museum and is, instead, caustic
about ‘l’extrême crédulité de nos pères’ [our ancestors’ extreme credulousness]. 153 Yet on other
152
Jules Adeline quoted in E-H Langlois, p.86.
153
Langlois, Les Enervés de Jumièges. p.23. For the legend and its afterlife see Bussillet, Les Enervés de Jumièges.
148