The Empress was not in the least like what she had imagined. Short and stout, though exceedingly dignified, her white hair was raised high above her forehead, her face, still handsome, expressed the power and genius which characterised her commanding personality, her eyes and her voice were gentle, and her hands extremely beautiful. She had taken off one of her gloves, expecting the usual [126] salute, but Lisette had forgotten all about it till afterwards when the Ambassador asked, to her dismay, if she had remembered to kiss the hand of the Empress.
FORE:It is true! I have not my cocarde! No doubt I must have forgotten it and left it on my night-cap.As M. de Genlis was with his regiment, she went with a friend, the Marquise de Brugnon, who was also young and pretty, MM. de Bouzolle and de Nedonchel. A room had been lent them on the ground floor of a new house from which to see the fte, and, fearing there would be a great crowd, they arrived directly after dinner. There was some delay before the fireworks began, and Flicit, who was, with all her talents, very often extremely silly and affected, declared that she had waited so long she did not care to see the fireworks, and persisted in keeping her eyes shut until they were over.
FORE:For more than a year she did not dare to pass the Palais Royal or to cross the place Louis XV., too many phantoms seemed to haunt and reproach her for the past.
ONE:E. H. Bearne
TWO:From this time began her brilliant career. Essentially a woman of the world, delighting in society and amusement, though always praising the pleasures of solitude and retirement, she entered the household of the Duchesse dOrlans, wife of the infamous Philippe-galit, and while constantly declaiming against ambition managed to get all her relations lucrative posts at the Palais Royal, and married one if not both her daughters to rich men of rank with notoriously bad reputations.
You are the painter, Isabey?Eh! Madame, cried the Queen impatiently, spare us ceremonial in the face of nature.She observed also that it was now usual for all the men to stand at one side of the room, leaving the women at the other, as if they were enemies.In the fearful tragedy of the French Revolution, as in many earlier dramas in the history of that nation, one can hardly fail to be struck by the extreme youth of many, perhaps most, of the leading characters, good or bad. And the hero and heroine of this act in the revolutionary drama were young, and both remarkable for their beauty.The next morning the Baron himself brought up the tray with their breakfast, still declaring Mme. de Genlis was the Princess, and among the escort he gave them to Mons were two young cadets from Moravia, who had been pages to the Princess, by whom they had been specially recommended to the Baron. They both kissed her hand, and recognized her as Princess von Lansberg.M. le Brun, though neither disagreeable nor ill-tempered, was impossible on account of the dissipated life he led. Always running after other women, always gambling and in debt, spending not only his own money but all his wifes earnings, another woman would have left him or led a miserable life. Not so Lisette. She lived in his house on friendly terms with him, though their marriage had long been one only in name.
