TWO:The next day they left Zug. M. de Chartres went to Coire, in the Engadine, where for fifteen months he gave lessons in mathematics in a college under an assumed name, while Mme. de Genlis and her two charges took refuge in a convent near the little town of Bremgarten, where they were admitted through M. de Montesquieu, another of the radical nobles obliged to flee from the tender mercies of his radical friends, of whom they had heard through M. de Montjoye, now living with his relations in Bale, when he had paid them a visit.After her brothers death she lost much of her prestige, and held her salon in the rue St. Honor, most of her habitus, after her death, transferring themselves to the house of Mme. Geoffrin.
TWO:The royalists were just now all the more bitter against La Fayette, as he was supposed to have been partly the cause of the death of M. de Favras, who was engaged in a plot for the liberation of the King, which was unfortunately discovered. The King and Queen tried in vain to save him; he was condemned and put to death.As they were talking one day on the subject to Father Carrichon, the Duchess asked him if he would promise to be with them at the foot of the scaffold. He did so, adding that he would wear a dark blue coat and a red carmagnole.
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.To Lisette she seemed to be about a hundred years of age, though she was not really very old, but her costume, a dark grey dress and a cap over which she wore a large hood tied under her chin, and her bent figure, increased the appearance of age.
TWO:Pauline also had something like what would now be called by us a district at Montmartre, not far from the rue Chantereine, where she lived; but she had poor pensioners all over Paris to whom she gave food, firing, clothes, doctors, everything [211] they wanted, and whom she visited constantly. Old and young, good and bad, beggars, prisoners, every sort of distress found a helper in her.She sent her boy to America under the name of Motier, to be brought up under the care of Washington, and then went to Auvergne to see her old aunt, fetch her daughters, and settle her affairs; she had borrowed some money from the Minister of the United States and some diamonds from Rosalie, and had bought back her husbands chateau [253] of Chavaniac with the help of the aunt who had brought him up, and who remained there.