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ONE:[401] TWO:Although stupid, M. Geoffrin was harmless, good, and charitable. Their only child, the Marquise de la Fert Imbault, adored her father, whom she preferred to her mother. She was a pretty, high-spirited girl, an ardent Catholic, hated her mothers atheist friends, and always declared that she had forced her into her marriage, which, although a great one, was not a happy one.
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ONE:She wrote pages and pages to the Duchess, who would not answer the letters except by a few short lines, and refused to enter into the matter at all, but declined to receive Mme. de Genlis at the Palais Royal to dine as usual. Here is an example of what the Duchesse dAbrants and others have said about Mme. de Genlis having nothing of the dignity that she might have been expected to possess. Her behaviour contrasts strongly with that of the Duchesse dOrlans, who, however foolish and credulous she may have been, showed at any rate [422] that she was a Princess of France. It was not for her to discuss or dispute with Mme. de Genlis about her influence with her husband and children; it was for her to give orders and for the governess of her children to obey them. But these late proceedings were different and tangible, and Mme. de Genlis herself owns in her Mmoires, written long after, that the objections of the Duchess, which she then thought so exaggerated and unjust, were right and well-founded. She declares that she had no idea how far the Revolution would go, that she was strongly attached to the Monarchy and to religion, which latter was certainly true, and there is no reason to suppose she contemplated a Republic, while the horrors that took place were odious to her. TWO:As to her writings, then so much in vogue, they were mostly works intended either to explain, assist, or illustrate the system of education which was the hobby of her life and which, if one may judge by Adle et Thodore, one of the most important of her tales, can only be called preposterous.
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ONE:It was whilst Mme. de Genlis was in Altona that she heard of the fall of Robespierre and the deliverance of her daughter. She was then living in a boarding-house, or inn, kept by a certain Mme. Plock, where she spent a good deal of time; and about one oclock one morning she was sitting up in her room, writing, when she suddenly heard a [450] violent knocking at her door, and the voice of M. de Kercy, a peaceable friendly acquaintance of hers, whose room was close by, called out TWO:
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ONE:Neither Napoleon nor any of his family had at all the manners and customs suitable to the position in which he had placed them, and he was quite aware of the fact. His mother, as he said, could speak neither French nor Italian properly, but only a kind of Corsican patois, which he was ashamed to hear. He did everything he could to win over the emigrs and those of the old noblesse who had remained [460] in France; his great wish was to mingle the new noblesse he soon began to create with the faubourg St. Germain, and his great disappointment and anger was excited by the non-success of his attempts. From the time he rose to supreme power he contemplated a court and a noblesse for the country and a crown for himself. And that a court formed out of the materials supplied by his generals and their families would be ridiculous he knew, and meant to avoid. TWO:It is satisfactory to know that the brutal, dastardly conduct of the Versailles populace was at any rate punished, in a way they probably had not thought of. The departure of the King and court ruined the place, before so prosperous. The population shrunk to a third of its former numbers.The party who, like the more sensible and moderate reformers, wished only for the abolition of abuses, and for such considerable reforms in the government and laws as should give freedom and gradual prosperity to the whole nation, without destroying or plundering one class for the benefit of another, vainly imagined that they would establish a constitution like that which in England had been the growth of centuries, in a few days or weeks, amongst a people totally different in every characteristic, quite unaccustomed to freedom, self-government, or calm deliberation, and exasperated by generations of tyranny.
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ONE:One of her first portraits was that of the Polish Countess Potocka who came with the Count, and directly he had gone away said to Mme. Le Brun: That is my third husband, but I think I am going to take the first back again; he suits me better, though he is a drunkard. TWO:
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