ONE:Paris without the wide streets of enormous houses, the broad, shady boulevards, the magnificent shops and crowded pavements, the glare and wealth and luxury of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Paris of old France, of the Monarchy, with its ancient towers and buildings, its great h?tels and convents with vast gardens above whose high walls rose stately trees; its narrow, crooked, ill-paved [34] streets, mostly unsafe to walk in after dusk, through which troops of cavalry clattered in gay uniforms, scattering the foot-passengers right and left, and magnificent coaches drawn by four, six, or eight horses lumbered heavily along.
TWO:In Heavens name dont marry him, cried the Duchess. You will be miserable.
TWO:These children, of whom she was the elder by a year, were the only ones who survived of the four born to their parents, and were devotedly fond of each other; the remembrance of their happy childhood together in the rambling old chateau and the great garden with its terrace over the Loire always remained vividly impressed upon the mind of Flicit.
THREE:One morning the concierge of an isolated house there was asked by a tall, thin man in black, with a strange look whether there was not a pavilion in the garden to let.Thus she wandered from place to place during the rest of her nine years of exile, generally under an assumed name; going now and then to Berlin, after the Kings death, and to Hamburg, which was full of emigrs, but where she met M. de Talleyrand and others of her own friends. Shunned and denounced by many, welcomed by others, she made many friends of different grades, from the brother and sister-in-law of the King of Denmark to worthy Mme. Plock, where she lodged in Altona, and the good farmer in Holstein, in whose farmhouse she lived. The storms and troubles of her life did not subdue her spirits; she was always ready for a new friendship, enjoying society, but able to do without it; taking an interest in everything, walking about the country in all weathers, playing the harp, reading, teaching a little boy she had adopted and called Casimir, and writing books by which she easily supported herself and increased her literary reputation.
THREE: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.
