Gaetan retired from the stage at the successful debut of Auguste, but appeared again from time to time to show his invulnerability to time.  On the occasion of his son’s first appearance, the veteran, in full court dress, sword, and ruffles, and hat in hand, stepped to the front by the side of the debutante.  After a short address to the public on the importance of the choreographic art and his hopes of his son, he turned to Auguste and said:  “Now, my son, exhibit your talent.  Your father is looking at you.”  He was accustomed to say:  “Auguste is a better dancer than I am; he had Gaetan Vestris for a father, an advantage which nature refused me.”  “If,” said Gaetan, on another occasion, “le dieu de la danse” (a title which he had given himself) “touches the ground from time to time, he does so in order not to humiliate his comrades.”

     * This boast of Gaetan Vestris seems to have inspired the
     lines which Moore afterward addressed to a celebrated
     danseuse: 

“....  You’d swear, When her delicate feet in the dance twinkle round, That her steps are of light, that her home is the air, And she only par complaisance touches the ground.”

The son inherited the paternal arrogance.  To the director of the opera, De Vismes, who, enraged at some want of respect, said to him, “Do you know who I am?” he drawled, “Yes! you are the farmer of my talent.”  On one occasion Auguste refused to obey the royal mandate, and Gaetan said to him with some reproof in his tones:  “What! the Queen of France does her duty by requesting you to dance before the King of Sweden, and you do not do yours!  You shall no longer bear my name.  I will have no misunderstanding between the house of Vestris and the house of Bourbon; they have hitherto always lived on good terms.”  It nearly broke Auguste’s heart when one day during the French Revolution he was seized by a howling band of sans culottes and made to exhibit his finest skill on the top of a barrel before this ragged mob of liberty-loving citizens!

The fascinating sylph, Madeleine Guimard, broke almost as many hearts and inspired as many duels as the charming Sophie Arnould herself.  Plain even to ugliness, and excessively thin, her exquisite dancing and splendid eyes made great havoc among her numerous admirers.  Lord Byron said that thin women when young reminded him of dried butterflies, when old of spiders.  The stage associates of Mile.  Guimard called her “L’araignee,” and Sophie Arnould christened her “the little silkworm,” for the sake of the joke about “la feuille.”  But such spiteful raillery did not prevent her charming men to her feet whom greater beauties had failed to captivate.  Houdon the sculptor molded her foot, and the great painters vied for the privilege of decorating the walls of her hotel.  When she broke her arm, mass was said in church for her recovery, and she was one of the reigning toasts of Paris.  Among