In Greek art Leto usually appears carrying her children in her arms, pursued by the dragon sent by the jealous Hera, which is slain by the infant Apollo; in vase paintings especially she is often represented with Apollo and Artemis. The statue of Leto in the Letoön at Argos was the work of Praxiteles.
LATOUCHE, HYACINTHE JOSEPH ALEXANDRE THABAUD DE [known as Henri] (1785–1851), French poet and
novelist, was born at La Châtre (Indre) on the 2nd of February 1785. Among his works may be distinguished his comedies: Projets de sagesse (1811), and, in collaboration with Émile Deschamps, Selmours de Florian (1818), which ran for a hundred nights; also La Reine d’Espagne (1831), which proved too indecent for the public taste; a novel, Fragoletta: Naples et Paris en 1799 (1829), which attained a success of notoriety; La Vallée aux coups (1833), a volume of prose essays and verse; and two volumes of poems, Les Adieux (1843) and Les Agrestes (1844). Latouche’s chief claim to remembrance is that he revealed to the world the genius of André Chénier, then only known to a limited few. The remains of the poet’s work had passed from the hands of Daunou to Latouche, who had sufficient critical insight instantly to recognize their value. In editing the first selection of Chénier’s poems (1819) he made some trifling emendations, but did not, as Béranger afterwards asserted, make radical and unnecessary changes. Latouche was guilty of more than one literary fraud. He caused a licentious story of his own to be attributed to the duchesse de Duras, the irreproachable author of Ourika. He made many enemies by malicious attacks on his contemporaries. The Constitutionnel was suppressed in 1817 by the government for an obscure political allusion in an article by Latouche. He then undertook the management of the Mercure du XIX e siècle, and began a bitter warfare against the monarchy. After 1830 he edited the Figaro, and spared neither the liberal politicians nor the romanticists who triumphed under the monarchy of July. In his turn he was violently attacked by Gustave Planche in the Revue des deux mondes for November 1831. But it must be remembered to the credit of Latouche that he did much to encourage George Sand at the beginning of her career. The last twenty years of his life were spent in retirement at Aulnay, where he died on the 9th of March 1851.
Sainte-Beuve, in the Causeries du lundi, vol. 3, gives a not too sympathetic portrait of Latouche. See also George Sand in the Siècle for the 18th, 19th and 20th of July 1851.
LA TOUR, MAURICE QUENTIN DE (1704–1788), French pastellist, was born at St Quentin on the 5th of September 1704. After leaving Picardy for Paris in 1727 he entered the studio of Spoède—an upright man, but a poor master, rector of the academy of St Luke, who still continued, in the teeth of the Royal Academy, the traditions of the old gild of the master painters of Paris. This possibly contributed to the adoption by La Tour of a line of work foreign to that imposed by an academical training; for pastels, though occasionally used, were not a principal and distinct branch of work until 1720, when Rosalba Carriera brought them into fashion with the Parisian world. In 1737 La Tour exhibited the first of that splendid series of a hundred and fifty portraits which formed the glory of the Salon for the succeeding thirty-seven years. In 1746 he was received into the academy; and in 1751, the following year to that in which he received the title of painter to the king, he was promoted by that body to the grade of councillor. His work had the rare merit of satisfying at once both the taste of his fashionable models and the judgment of his brother artists. His art, consummate of its kind, achieved the task of flattering his sitters, whilst hiding that flattery behind the just and striking likeness which, says Pierre Jean Mariette, he hardly ever missed. His portraits of Rousseau, of Voltaire, of Louis XV., of his queen, of the dauphin and dauphiness, are at once documents and masterpieces unsurpassed except by his life-size portrait of Madame de Pompadour, which, exhibited at the Salon of 1755, became the chief ornament of the cabinet of pastels in the Louvre. The museum of St Quentin also possesses a magnificent collection of works which at his death were in his own hands. La Tour retired to St Quentin at the age of 80, and there he died on the 18th of February 1788. The riches amassed during his long life were freely bestowed by him in great part before his death; he founded prizes at the school of fine arts in Paris and for the town of Amiens, and endowed St Quentin with a great number of useful and charitable institutions. He never married, but lived on terms of warm affection with his brother (who survived him, and left to the town the drawings now in the museum); and his relations to Mlle Marie Fel (1713–1789), the celebrated singer, were distinguished by a strength and depth of feeling not common to the loves of the 18th century.
See, in addition to the general works on French art, C. Desmeze, M. Q. de La Tour, peintre du roi (1854); Champfleury, Les Peintres de Laon et de St Quentin (1855); and “La Tour” in the Collection des artistes célèbres (1886); E. and J. de Goncourt, La Tour (1867); Guiffrey and M. Tourneux, Correspondance inédite de M. G. de la Tour (1885); Tourneux, La Tour, biographie critique (1904); and Patoux, L’Œuvre de M. Quentin de la Tour au musée de St Quentin (St Quentin, 1882).
LA TOUR D’AUVERGNE, THÉOPHILE MALO (1743–1800), French soldier, was born at Carhaix in Brittany on the 23rd of December 1743, the son of an advocate named Corret. His desire for a military career being strongly marked, he was enabled, by the not uncommon device of producing a certificate of nobility signed by his friends, first to be nominally enlisted in the Maison du Roi, and soon afterwards to receive a commission in the line, under the name of Corret de Kerbaufret. Four years after joining, in 1771, he assumed by leave of the duke of Bouillon the surname of La Tour d’Auvergne, being in fact descended from an illegitimate half-brother of the great Turenne. Many years of routine service with his regiment were broken only by his participation as a volunteer in the duc de Crillon’s Franco-Spanish expedition to Minorca in 1781. This led to an offer of promotion into the Spanish army, but he refused to change his allegiance. In 1784 he was promoted captain, and in 1791 he received the cross of St Louis. In the early part of the Revolution his patriotism was still more conspicuously displayed in his resolute opposition to the proposals of many of his brother officers in the Angoumois regiment to emigrate rather than to swear to the constitution. In 1792 his lifelong interest in numismatics and questions of language was shown by a work which he published on the Bretons. At this time he was serving under Montesquiou in the Alps, and although there was only outpost fighting he distinguished himself by his courage and audacity, qualities which were displayed in more serious fighting in the Pyrenees the next year. He declined well-earned promotion to colonel, and, being broken in health and compelled, owing to the loss of his teeth, to live on milk, he left the army in 1795. On his return by sea to Brittany he was captured by the English and held prisoner for two years. When released, he settled at Passy and published Origines gauloises, but in 1797, on the appeal of an old friend whose son had been taken as a conscript, he volunteered as the youth’s substitute, and served on the Rhine (1797) and in Switzerland (1798–1799) as a captain. In recognition of his singular bravery and modesty Carnot obtained a decree from the first consul naming La Tour d’Auvergne “first grenadier of France” (27th of April 1800). This led him to volunteer again, and he was killed in action at Oberhausen, near Donauwörth, on the 27th of June 1800.
La Tour d’Auvergne’s almost legendary courage had captivated the imagination of the French soldier, and his memory was not suffered to die. It was customary for the French troops and their allies of the Rhine Confederation under Napoleon to march at attention when passing his burial-place on the battlefield. His heart was long carried by the grenadier company of his regiment, the 46th; after being in the possession of Garibaldi for many years, it was finally deposited in the keeping of the city of Paris in 1883. But the most striking tribute to his memory is paid to-day as it was by order of the first consul in 1800. “His name is to be kept on the pay list and roll of his company. It will be called at all parades and a non-commissioned officer will reply, Mort au champ d’honneur.” This custom, with little variation, is still observed in the 46th regiment on all occasions when the colour is taken on parade.
