TWO:For more than twenty years M. le Comte de Charolois has detained in captivity, against her will, Mme. de Conchamp, wife of a Ma?tre-des-Requtes, whom he carried off, and who would have been [7] much happier in her own house. Fifteen out of twenty men at the court do not live with their wives but have mistresses, and even amongst private people at Paris, nothing is more frequent; therefore it is ridiculous to expect the King, who is absolutely the master, to be in a worse position than his subjects and all the kings his predecessors.However, she had plenty of interests, and made many English friends besides the numerous French emigrs she found there. She painted the portraits of the Prince of Wales, Lord Byron, the Comtesse de Polastron, adored by the Comte dArtois, who was [151] inconsolable when she died soon afterwards, and many othersEnglish, French, Russian, and Germanand made the acquaintance of the first musicians, actors, and singers of the day; also of the painters, many of whom were extremely jealous of her.
TWO:Stop! Stop! It is the Emperor! But as she was getting out, he descended from his sledge and hastened to prevent her, saying with a most gracious air that his orders did not apply to foreigners, above all, not to Mme. Le Brun.
TWO:On those wild autumn days she would sit in the great tapestried room working while her mother read and discoursed to her of the great truths of religion, the power and mercy of God, and the faith and courage which alone could support them amidst the trials and perils gathering around them; of the sufferings and victories of the saints and martyrs; of the swiftly passing trials and shadows of this world, the glory and immortality of the life beyond. And Pauline hung upon her mothers words, for [224] she knew that they might be the last she would ever hear from that beloved voice, and her courage failed when she tried to tell her of her approaching exile. Mme. dAyen would every now and then address her counsels and instructions to the little grand-daughter who adored her; and the mother and daughter would unite their prayers amidst the rushing of the tempests or the clamours of the Jacobin club set up close to the chateau. All around was changed and terrible; they thought anxiously of those absent, and looked sadly at the church where they no longer went, as the cur was asserment; and as the time drew near for her mothers departure Pauline continually resolved to tell her of her own, but she could never bring herself to do so.
TWO:There Pauline had a son, and to her great joy he and the children she afterwards had lived to grow up. The farm Mme. de Tess wished for was called Wittmold, and lay at the other side of the lake upon a plain covered with pasture and ponds, as far as the eye could reach. The house stood on a promontory jutting out into the lake, and was surrounded by fields, apple trees, and pine woods. They crossed the lake in boats, and established themselves there. They could live almost entirely upon the produce of the place, for there was plenty of game, plenty of fish in the lake: the dairy farm paid extremely well, the pasture produced rich, delicious milk; they had a hundred and twenty cows, and made enormous quantities of butter, which they sold at Hamburg. It was pleasant enough in the summer, but in winter the lake was frozen, the roads covered with snow, and the cold wind from the Baltic raved round the house. However, they were thankful for the shelter of a home that most of their friends would have envied, and they lived peacefully there for four years, during which Pauline organised and carried on a great work of charity which, with the assistance of one or two influential friends, soon spread all over Europe. It was a kind of society with branches in different countries, to collect subscriptions for the relief of the French exiles, and it involved an enormous amount of letter-writing, for, if the subscriptions poured into Wittmold, so did letters of entreaty, appealing for help. But Pauline was indefatigable not only in allotting the different sums of money, [255] but in finding employment, placing young girls as governesses, selling drawings and needlework, &c.
