Dvques et de grands vicaires,Mme. de Genlis had friends amongst old and new, French and foreign. The Vernets, Mme. Le Brun, Mme. Grollier, Gros, Gerard, Isabey, Cherubini, Halvy, all the great singers and musicians were among her friends. She lived to see the first years of the brilliant, too short career of Malibran. Pasta, Grassini, Talma, Garat, and numbers of other artistic celebrities mingled with [481] her literary friends. The household of Isabey was like an idyl. He had met his wife in the Luxembourg gardens, a beautiful girl who went there to lead about her blind father. They married and were always happy though for a long time poor. But the fame of Isabey rose; he was professor of painting at the great school of Mme. Campan, where every one under the Empire sent their daughters. He painted Josphine and all the people of rank and fashion, and received them all at his parties in his own h?tel. Mme. Isabey lived to be eighty-eight, always pretty and charming. Her hair was white, she always dressed in white lace and muslin, and had everything white in her salon, even to an ivory spinning wheel.
ONE:Mme. de Puisieux was in tears on the staircase, and saw her come in with transports of joy. She had, for the first time since her widowhood, gone to supper with Mme. dEgmont, daughter of the Duc de Richelieu, close to whose h?tel there was a corps de garde, to which numbers of bodies had been brought. The next day was one of desolation, especially among the artisans and the people of the lower classes, most of whom had lost some relative or friend. Mme. de Genliss maid had to go to the [382] Morgue to identify the body of her sister; the ma?tre dh?tel lost a cousin. The place Louis XV., fated to be the scene of the murder of Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, and so many innocent victims, had been a scene of death and horror at the celebration of their wedding ftes. No wonder people said it was an unlucky beginning, especially those who were only too glad to find evils attending the Austrian marriage. [114]
TWO:Of course, replied Napoleon, but you should find a marriage for her at once; to-morrow; and then go.
THREE:Severe as was her loss to Pauline a more terrible calamity happened to her in 1824, in the death of her only son Attale, who was killed by an accident when out shooting, leaving a young wife and children to her care.
TWO:However, she was so far identified with the Revolutionary party as not only to rejoice at the infamous attack of the mob upon the Bastille, but to consent to her pupils request to take them to [415] Paris to see the mob finishing the destruction of that beautiful and historic monument.
TWO:However that might be, he spent enormous sums, lavished money upon the Princes and the Queen, for whom Saint Cloud was bought, and to whom he said upon one occasionBesides the immense number of her friends and acquaintance of later years, she kept up faithfully those of her early days. Her old fellow student, Mlle. Boquet, had given up the profession in which she was getting on so well, and married a M. Filleul, whom the Queen had made her concierge de la Muette. [31]
The Comtesses de Flahault and de Marigny, two sisters, both young, thoughtless, and eager for adventures, were anxious to see and consult a certain wizard, then very much the fashion, about whom their curiosity was greatly aroused by the stories told of him.Casimir was already seventeen, a great comfort, and very popular. He had been on a visit to London, when, as he returned with Prince Esterhazy, who had a boat of his own, he had a message at Dover from Pamela begging him to go to her. Since the arrest and death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, she had married Mr. Pitcairn, American Consul at Hamburg, but was overwhelmed with debts, and for some reason insisted on coming to Paris. She was hiding from her creditors, and appealed to Casimir, who gave her fifty louis and hid her on board the boat. She had with her her daughter by Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and stayed some time at Paris, in spite of the representations of Mme. de Genlis that she ought to go back to her husband at Hamburg.A fashionable promenade was the boulevard du Temple, where every day, especially Thursdays, hundreds of carriages were to be seen driving up and down or standing under the shade of trees now replaced by houses, shops, and cafs. Young men rode in and out amongst them, notorious members of the demi-monde tried to surpass every one in the splendour of their dress and carriages. A certain Mlle. Renard had her carriage drawn by four horses, their harness studded with imitation jewels. It was not an age of imitation. In those days as a rule lace was real lace, jewels were real jewels, and if tawdry imitations and finery were worn it was by women of this class. Respectable people would never have dreamed of bedizening themselves with the sort of cheap rubbish with which the modern women of the lower classes delight to disfigure their houses and their dress.MADAME ROYALE
荣誉榜
THREE:For the only consolation was that now the monsters were turning on each other; there were, in fact, more republicans than royalists in the [327] prisons. Every now and then some blood-stained miscreant was brought in amongst those whose homes he had wrecked, whose dear ones he had murdered, and whose fate he was now to share; while all shrunk in horror from him, or mocked and triumphed as he passed. When Chaumette, the high priest of the Revolution, one of the most blasphemous and blood-stained wretches of all, was brought to the Luxembourg, the prisoners would look through the little guichet where he was shut up, asking each other, Have you seen the wolf?
THREE:
