For six months she worked with enthusiasm, perfectly happy and engrossed with her painting, never noticing that her landlord, who was a good-looking, pleasant, but exceedingly dissipated man, was paying her great attention, having fallen violently in love with her.She married, in 1788, the Marquis de Grammont.The lavish, almost barbaric hospitality of the [131] great Russian nobles both at St. Petersburg and Moscow astonished Mme. Le Brun. Many of them possessed colossal fortunes and kept open house. Prince Narischkin, Grand Equerry, had always a table to sit five-and-twenty or thirty guests.
FORE:Before the coronation of Napoleon, the latter said to him, Make two large water-colour sketches of the procession with correct costumes, every one in their right place. I will send them to study your designs, which will be exhibited in the great [482] gallery of the Tuileries, so that there may be no confusion.Very different was the letter of M. de Sillery. He, at any rate, if he had been wrong and mistaken, was ready and willing to pay the penalty.
Trzia questioned her friend about him, and was told that he was a good secretary, clever but idle, and of so bad a reputation that M. de Lameth was waiting for an opportunity to get rid of him.Well, citoyenne, I shall give orders for your trial to come on at once before the tribunal. If the citoyen Fontenay is not guilty you are not either. In consequence you will be able to go on and see your father at Madrid.But the stories against Mme. de Genlis have never been cleared up. Much that was said about her was undoubtedly false, but there remain serious accusations which can neither be proved nor disproved; and that a long, intimate friendship between a prince of the character of Philippe-galit and a young, attractive woman who was governess to his children should have been no more than a platonic one, passes the bounds of credibility.That she persistently refused proves how much all these professions were worth, and this time she does in her memoirs blame herself for her conduct; in fact, she declares that she felt ever afterwards a remorse that never left her, and that would be eternal; as she considered herself the cause of the death of her husband. If she had gone with him as he entreated her to do and as she acknowledged that she ought to have done, she could have induced him to leave France with her, he had sufficient money to enable them to live comfortably abroad, and his life would have been saved.