The third portrait Mme. Le Brun retained in her own possessionfor she had begun it in September, 1789, when the terrors of the Revolution were beginning. As she painted at Louveciennes they could hear the thunder of the cannonades, and the unfortunate Mme. Du Barry said to her
Les vers que lamour me dictaitEh! Madame, cried the Queen impatiently, spare us ceremonial in the face of nature.Mesdames de France, the two last remaining daughters of Louis XV., arrived in Rome and at once sent for Mme. Le Brun, who was delighted to see them again. They had with great difficulty succeeded in getting away, and had been most anxious to take their niece, Madame Elizabeth, with them. In vain they entreated her to come, she persisted in staying with the King and Queen, and sacrificed her life in so doing.
FORE:Like all the other emigres Mme. de Genlis was horrified at the strange manners and customs of the new society, largely composed of vulgar, uneducated [458] persons, often enormously rich, exceedingly pretentious, and with no idea how to conduct themselves.
ONE:
TWO:However, the predictions were fulfilled. Mme. de Marigny, after many misfortunes, died young. The Comte de Flahault was guillotined during the Terror, and the Comtesse escaped with her son to England, where she lived in great poverty in a village near London, until a friend of hers, the Marquis , also an emigr, suggested to her that she should write a novel. That same night she began Adle de Senanges, which she sold for 100 to a publisher in London, and after which she continued by her writing to support herself and [44] educate her boy at a good English school. When she returned to France she lived at a small h?tel in an out-of-the-way part of Paris until she married M. de Souza, the Portuguese Ambassador.
THREE:Mme. de Genlis, finding Paris too dear, moved to Versailles where she lived for a time, during which she had the grief of losing her nephew, Csar Ducrest, a promising young officer, who was killed by an accident.
FORE:
The days were rapidly approaching when she would be thankful that an early death had saved him from the fate of his brother.Then she fled to her own room and gave way [225] to her grief, and to the forebodings which filled her mind, and still hung over her like a cloud, during the preparations and journey to Paris, where M. de Montagu soon wrote for his wife and child to join him without delay.Plus dun baiser payait ma chansonette,In a very short time, however, she was summoned out of the prison and conducted by the gaolers into the presence of Tallien.Indeed, many houses had been illuminated, such [145] was the terror he had inspired and the cruelty of his actions.But Lisette fretted and made herself unhappy, especially when a deliberate attempt was made to destroy her reputation by a certain Mme. S, who lived in the rue Gros-Chenet, to which she herself had not yet removed.
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