FORE:Very well, let us go to breakfast then, but keep quiet, I beseech you. Not that way, as his companion turned towards the Luxembourg.In Mme. Le Brun, the most gifted of all, we see a beauty, a genius, and a woman unusually charming and attractive, thrown, before she was sixteen, into the society of the magnificent, licentious court of Louis XV. Married to a dissipated, bourgeois spendthrift, for whom she had never cared; sought after, flattered, and worshipped in all the great courts of Europe; courted by fascinating, unscrupulous men of the highest rank, without the protection of family connections and an assured [viii] position; yet her religious principles, exalted character, and passionate devotion to her art, carried her unscathed and honoured through a life of extraordinary dangers and temptations.
Cras consequat iaculis lorem, id vehicula erat mattis quis. Vivamus laoreet velit justo, in ven e natis purus.
FORE:Of the Dauphine, Marie-Josphe de Saxe, as well as of his father, their son the Comte de Provence, afterwards Louis XVIII., writes in his Memoirs as follows: His pure soul could not rest on this earth, his crown was not of this world, and he died young. France had to mourn the premature death of a prince, who, if he had lived might perhaps have saved the kingdom from the catastrophe of a blood-stained revolution, and his family from exile and the scaffold.Presently they observed a strange, ugly-looking man, who was watching them with a mocking smile.
Cras consequat iaculis lorem, id vehicula erat mattis quis. Vivamus laoreet velit justo, in ven e natis purus.
FORE:Everybody was afraid of Louis XIV., and even of Louis XV. At any rate, they ruled. They commanded, and their subjects obeyed.
Cras consequat iaculis lorem, id vehicula erat mattis quis. Vivamus laoreet velit justo, in ven e natis purus.
FORE:The chanoinesses were free to take vows or not, either at the prescribed age or later. If they did not, they had only the honour of the title of Countess and the decorations of the order. If they did, they got one of the dwellings and a good pension, but they could not marry, and must spend two out of every three years there; with the other year they could do as they liked. They might also adopt as a niece a young chanoinesse on condition she always stayed with them and took the vows when she was the proper age. Her adopted aunt might leave her all her jewels, furniture, &c., as well as her little house and pension. One of them wished to adopt Flicit, but her mother would not consent. They stayed there six weeks and then went home, Flicit in despair at leaving the nuns, [354] who petted and loaded her with bonbons, but much consoled by being called Madame.
Cras consequat iaculis lorem, id vehicula erat mattis quis. Vivamus laoreet velit justo, in ven e natis purus.
FORE:[39]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.
FORE:
FORE:Mme. de Genlis some time afterwards married her niece, Henriette de Sercey, to a rich merchant in Hamburg, after which she went to Berlin, but where she was denounced to the King, accused, without truth, of receiving the Abb de Sieys, then in Berlin, and ordered to leave the Prussian territory.One day Lisette was driving, and seeing him coming when her coachman did not, she called out
FORE:
FORE:You think me de trs bonne maison, dont you? said the King; well, I myself should find difficulty in entering that order, because in the female line I descend in the eighth degree from a procureur.ALL the great artists, musicians, actors, and literary people who had returned to Paris after the Terror came to the salon of Mme. de Genlis; and many were the strange and terrible stories they had to tell of their escapes and adventures.
