text: During the two weeks after the wedding had taken place in secret, the artist was visited by a stream of people giving her ominous news regarding her husband, these people believing that she had still not agreed to his proposal. These visitors started with the court jeweller, followed by the Duchesse de Arenberg and Mme. de Souza, the Portuguese ambassadress, who passed stories of M. Le Brun's habits as a spendthrift and womanizer. Élisabeth would later regret this match as she found these rumors to be true, though she wrote that in spite of his faults he was still an agreeable and obliging man with a sweet nature. However, she frequently condemned his gambling and adulterous habits in her memoirs, as these left her in a financially critical position at the time of her flight from France. Her relationship with him deteriorated later so much that she demanded the refund of her dowry from M. Le Brun in 1802. Vigée Le Brun began exhibiting her work at their home, and the salons she held there supplied her with many new and important contacts.
  Her husband's great-great-uncle was Charles Le Brun, the first director of the French Academy under Louis XIV. Her husband appropriated most of her income and pressed her to also take on the role of a private tutor to increase his income from her. The artist found tutoring to be frustrating due to her inability to assert authority over her pupils, most of whom were older than her, and found the distraction from her work irritating; she renounced tutoring soon after she had begun.
  Daughter Julie
  After two years of marriage, Vigée Le Brun became pregnant, and on 12 February 1780, she gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne Lucie Louise, whom she called Julie and nicknamed "Brunette". In 1784, she gave birth to a second child who died in infancy.
  In 1781, she and her husband toured Flanders, Brussels and the Netherlands, where seeing the works of the Flemish masters inspired her to try new techniques. Her Self-portrait in a Straw Hat (1782) was a "free imitation" of Rubens's Le Chapeau de Paille. Dutch and Flemish influences have also been noted in The Comte d'Espagnac (1786) and Madame Perregaux (1789).