There was also the salon of Mme. du Deffand, who, while more decidedly irreligious and atheistical than Mme. Geoffrin, was her superior in talent, birth, and education, and always spoke of her with the utmost disdain, as a bourgeoise without manners or instruction, who did not know [361] how to write, pronounce, or spell correctly, and saw no reason why people should not talk of des zharicots.
It having come to his knowledge that a plot was preparing for another massacre in the prisons on pretence of conspiracy among the prisoners, whose names and lives were at the mercy of the spies within and the police and gaolers without, he contrived by paying a hundred louis to get his own and Mme. de Coignys liberation, and after the Terror was over they married and went to England for their honeymoon. At the end of two months they were tired of each other, came back to Paris and were divorced, and the Baronne de Montrond again resumed the name of Coigny.However, the predictions were fulfilled. Mme. de Marigny, after many misfortunes, died young. The Comte de Flahault was guillotined during the Terror, and the Comtesse escaped with her son to England, where she lived in great poverty in a village near London, until a friend of hers, the Marquis , also an emigr, suggested to her that she should write a novel. That same night she began Adle de Senanges, which she sold for 100 to a publisher in London, and after which she continued by her writing to support herself and [44] educate her boy at a good English school. When she returned to France she lived at a small h?tel in an out-of-the-way part of Paris until she married M. de Souza, the Portuguese Ambassador.No, I shall come back here. It is not you who will go away, it is the scaffold.
ONE:Her favourite picture, the Sibyl, was bought by the Duc de Berri, to whom she parted with it rather reluctantly. In 1813 M. Le Brun died. His death was rather a melancholy regret than [157] a real sorrow to her, as they had long been separated by mutual consent.
ONE:They were to start at midnight, and it was quite time they did so.
TWO:Defended the King! A fine defence, truly! You might as well say that if I give a man poison, and then, when he is in the agonies of death, present him with an antidote, I wish to save him. For that is the way your grandfather defended Louis XVI.
TWO:One evening at a dinner-party of Prince von Kaunitz, when the conversation turned upon painting, some one was speaking of Rubens being appointed ambassador.The latter part of the sojourn of Mme. de Genlis in England was overshadowed by anxieties, annoyances, and fears.
THREE:Indeed, he said, you have a strange fancy. Night is made to sleep in; however, if it amuses you I have no objection so long as you do not expect me to be of the party.
