To divert his thoughts and attention from the rigours and cruelties, for the perpetration of which he had been sent to Bordeaux, she persuaded him to have his portrait done, and induced him and the artist to prolong the sittings on pretence of making the picture a chef d?uvre, but in reality to occupy his time and attention; in fact, he was found by some one who called to see him reclining comfortably in a boudoir, dividing his attention between the artist who was painting the portrait and Trzia, who was also present.
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What made this all the more provoking was that M. de Calonne was not even, like M. de Vaudreuil, [64] a great friend of hers. She did not know him at all intimately, and in fact only once went to a party given by him at the Ministre des finances, and that was because the soire was in honour of Prince Henry of Prussia, who was constantly at her house. The splendid portrait she painted of Calonne was exhibited in the Salon of 1786. Mlle. Arnould remarked on seeing it, Mme. Le Brun has cut his legs off to keep him in the same place, alluding to the picture being painted to the knees.E. H. BearneThere 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.La Fayette, accused and proscribed by his late admirers, had found himself so unwilling to trust [232] to their tender mercies that he fled to Lige. But having made himself equally obnoxious to both sides, he had no sooner escaped from the hands of his friends than he fell into those of his enemies, and was arrested by an Austrian patrol and detained, arbitrarily say his friendsbut why arbitrarily?was taken to Wesel, and had now to undergo a mild form of the suffering he had caused to so many others.
