Another description of the Comtesse de Provence:
The Comtesse de Provence was admired for her intelligence and wit (qualities she shared with her bookish husband), but she was no beauty, and Vigée Le Brun must have employed considerable genius to render her sitter with the grace and physical charm evident in the portrait while still making it recognizable as Marie Josephine. Short and dark, with a dusky complexion, long face, large nose, and bushy eyebrows, the Comtesse de Provence was, as Madame du Barry bluntly remarked, "ugly and she smelled." Her reluctance to wash, wear perfume or have her eyebrows plucked was regarded with such concern that two years into her marriage , her father, the King of Sardinia, wrote to her imploring that she try to please her husband and pay attention to her toilette (26 February 1773). Her lack of hygiene, in addition to her inability to bear children, finally drove Provence to abandon the marriage bed; by 1781 he was openly living at the Petit Luxembourg Palace, and her relationship with her husband sank - in the words of Philip Mansel, Louis XVIII's most recent biographer - to a level of "fairly amiable mutual endurance."
