The abbey was very beautiful, and there were more than a hundred nuns besides the lay sisters and the pensionnaires (children and young girls being educated there).
It was celebrated in the parish church at midnight, and the day was publicly announced, and the young Countess and her harp consigned to the care of her husband.The noblesse depe was the highest, most brilliant, and most scandalous in France; but in its ranks were to be found heroic examples and saintly characters; while far away in the convents and chateaux scattered over the country and in quiet bourgeois families in the towns lives were led of earnest faith, devotion, and self-denial.
ONE:I have no one with me, replied she, but my daughter and her governess.
ONE:And she turned away, leaving the soldier in tears.Presentation at VersaillesLa RosireFather and sonMme. de MontessonA terrible sceneThe Comtesse de CustineMme. de Genlis enters the Palais Royal.
TWO:She had not done so, however, and had even consented to his plan of their both leaving France and taking refuge with her father in Spain. She wished no harm to M. de Fontenay, and although in spite of all that had happened she still believed in the Revolution, its principles, and future results, she was horrified at the cruelty and atrocities going on around her at present.
All that country, Frascati, LAriccia, Castel Gandolfo, Albano, Gensano, is a dream of beauty and romance. Lakes, mountains, and forests, picturesque towns and villages perched high upon the steep sides of precipices, rocks crowned with ruined towers or convents, ancient villas like huge palaces, with colonnades, fountains, and loggie, buried among deep woods of ilex and chestnut, in whose cool shade they could spend the bright, hot, glowing days.Some weeks after their marriage the Comte de Genlis had to rejoin his regiment, which was at Nancy, and as it was then not the custom for officers wives to accompany them, and he thought Flicit too young to be left by herself at a court such as that of Louis XV., he decided to take an apartment for her at Origny, in a convent where he had relations, as people often did in such cases.Mme. Geoffrin [18] was born 1699: her father a [37] valet de chambre of the Dauphin. He and her mother died young and left her and her brother to the guardianship of their grandmother, a certain Mme. Chemineau, a woman of strong, upright character, and a devout Catholic, but narrow and without much education. She brought up her grandchildren with care and affection, and married the girl when about fourteen to M. Geoffrin, a rich and worthy commercial man of forty-eight. With him Thrse lived in tranquil obscurity until she was about thirty, when she became acquainted with the celebrated Mlle. Tencin, sister of the Cardinal, over whose house and salon she presided, and who, like Mme. Geoffrin, lived in the rue St. Honor.
