Chaptal must have been a handsome man in his youth. Coupled with his extraordinary talent, that was perhaps why Marie-Anne Lajard of Bagnols had taken a fancy to him. From then on, he escaped his financial difficulties and had enough funds to carry out his dreams and plans.
French industry was very backward at the time, relying too heavily on foreign countries for raw materials, especially in textiles. He believed that advances in modern chemistry would be enough to find substitutes for the missing raw materials and improve all kinds of manufacturing processes. The Lajard family, who also traded in cloth, grew even wealthier through Chaptal, while Chaptal used the marriage to enter Montpellier's closed and powerful financial and textile circles.
On Christmas Day, Georgiana accepted Chaptal's invitation and came to his private residence—the estate that had once belonged to Duke of Choiseul, a senior minister under Louis XV.
Georgiana believed that anyone who had gone through a failed romance and marriage like hers would feel like splurging. Napoleon Bonaparte had been generous, giving her six million to decorate the dining hall of the Tuileries Palace. It could be considered a breakup settlement. An ordinary cloth dyer might never see that much money in an entire lifetime.
The moment she thought of that, she lost all desire to splurge. Still, she truly did not intend to use the silks to decorate the dining hall. Like the Last Supper, she wanted to paint the French army's two crossings of the Alps onto the walls.
It would be a magnificent painting, with vast snow-capped mountains and soldiers using some unknown force to pry their sledges forward. Nothing could be more suitable for decorating a dining hall whose main patrons were men.
Besides that, she found a carpet among the returned spoils of