Next came her twin sister, Henriette, from whom she had parted almost heart-broken, when she reluctantly left France for Parma. Henriette was the Kings favourite daughter, the best and most charming of all the princesses. Lovely, gentle, and saintly, the Duc de Chartres [61] was deeply in love with her and she with him. The King was disposed to allow the marriage, but was dissuaded by Cardinal Fleury. If the Infanta had been in question she would have got her own way, but Henriette was too yielding and submissive. She died at twenty-five years of age, of the small-pox, so fatal to her race (1752) to the great grief of the court and royal family, and especially of the King, by whom she was adored.
Mme. de Genlis, however, found an opportunity of writing to the Duchess of Orlans in France; the Duke was by this time arrested.Paulette? said Napoleon. But she will follow you. I approve of her doing so; the air of Paris does not agree with her, it is only fit for coquettes, a character unbecoming her. She must accompany you, that is understood.
Director
THE Duke of Orlans died 1785, and Mme. de Montesson, having been forbidden by Louis XVI. to put her household into mourning or assume the position of a Duchess Dowager of Orlans, retired for a few weeks into a convent and then returned to her usual life, having inherited a great fortune from the late Duke.The people had had enough; they were tired of blood and murder. Even before Thermidor they had begun to murmur as the cars of victims passed through the streets; a reaction had begun.Yet the generosity and kindness of her heart, and the number of victims she saved, outweighed, though without effacing, the disorders of her earlier life, [1] during the latter part of which, as the wife of a Catholic, royalist prince, whose love she returned and to whose opinions she was converted, she deeply regretted the errors of Notre Dame de Thermidor.She was so talked about with the Duc de Chartres that the Queen would not receive her at her balls, [119] for Marie Antoinette was trying to bring some reform into the licence prevalent at court, where there was no end to the scandalous incidents that kept happening.