FORE:The interview closed to the mutual satisfaction of the King and his grandson, neither of them with the slightest idea of any more serious calamity than the quarrels at court between the Houses of Lorraine and Savoy being likely to interfere with the secure and magnificent tranquillity of their lives. But it wanted only eighteen years and a few months to the fall of the Bastille, and though the small-pox cut short the life of Louis XV. before the evil days, they were seen by many of his courtiers as old or older than himself.
FORE:After a very few months she married the Marquis de la Haie, who had been the page and then the [355] lover of the infamous Duchesse de Berri, eldest daughter of the Regent dOrlans.Louis XV., at this time about forty-five, extremely handsome, immersed in a life of pleasure, magnificence, and vice, was then under the domination of the Duchesse de Chateauroux, ma?tresse en titre, the youngest of the five daughters of the Marquis de Nesle, four of whom had been for a longer or shorter period the mistresses of Louis XV. That such a father as the King should have had such a son as the Dauphin is astonishing indeed. The author of some fascinating memoirs of the day writes of him, If I have not yet spoken of M. le Dauphin, do not suppose that it is from negligence or distraction, it is because the thought of his death always envelopes my mind like a funeral pall. His premature end is ever present with me, and is a subject of regret and affliction which I cannot approach without terrible emotion. He was so grievously mourned for, he has been so universally and justly praised, that there would not be much left me to tell you if I were not to speak of his perfect beauty, which was the least of his perfections, and which perhaps for that very reason, the writers of his time never mention.... His face and figure were perfectly formed; and he had, especially in the movement of his lips and the gentle, melancholy pride of his great black eyes, an expression which I have never seen unless perhaps in some old picture of the Spanish school ... he might have been an archangel of Murillo.... He carried with him the happiness of France and the peace of the world, but one felt that it would have [166] been perfect happiness, and that one would never experience it. The subjects, perhaps the family of the King his father had provoked such terrible chastisements, that we may sorrowfully say that France and the French of the eighteenth century were not worthy to be ruled by the Dauphin Louis. [56]
ONE:The Chasseurs de Lorraine and regiment de Flandre having been sent to Versailles on account of the crimes and murders daily committed there, the gardes-du-corps gave them a splendid banquet in the Salle de Comdie, to which all the troops, including the gardes-nationales, were invited.
TWO:Paris seemed to be awaking into life again; the streets were more animated, the people to be seen in them were more numerous and did not all look either brutal or terror-stricken. Art, literature, and social gaiety began to revive.Tallien heard it too, and it was like a blow to him. Do and say what he might, he could never shake off the stain of the September massacres, and time only increased the horror with which they were regarded.
THREE:Her way of living was very simple; she walked about the park summer and winter, visited the poor, to whom she was most kind and generous, wore muslin or cambric dresses, and had very few visitors. The only two women who came much to see her were Mme. de Souza, the Portuguese Ambassadress, and the Marquise de Brunoy. M. de Monville, a pleasant, well-bred man, was frequently there, and one day the Ambassador of Tippoo Sahib arrived to visit her, bringing a present of a number of pieces of muslin richly embroidered with gold, one of which she gave to Mme. Le Brun. The Duc de Brissac was of course there also, but, though evidently established at the chateau, there was nothing either in his manner or that of Mme. Du Barry to indicate anything more than friendship between them. Yet Mme. Le Brun saw plainly enough the strong attachment which cost them both their lives.
FORE:It was fixed, therefore, for the 8th of December; Rosalie helped her sister with all the necessary purchases and packing, so that the servants might not discover where she was going, and, on the morning of the day before their parting, the two sisters went at the break of day through the falling snow to receive the Communion at a secret Oratory, going a long way round for fear their footprints in the snow should betray them. The day was spent in finishing their preparations, and after her child was in bed Pauline wrote her farewell to her mother and eldest sister. The night was far advanced when the letters were finished, and her eyes still bore traces of tears when, before morning dawned, she rose and prepared to start.
The Duc dAyen, though always retaining a deep affection for his wife, spent a great part of his time away from her. He was one of the most conspicuous and brilliant figures at the court, and besides entering eagerly into all its pleasures, dissipation, and extravagance, was a member of the Academy of Science; and although by no means an atheist or an enemy of religion, associated constantly with the philosophers, whose ideas [164] and opinions he, like many of the French nobles in the years preceding the Revolution, had partly adopted, little imagining the terrible consequences that would result from them.In Mme. Le Brun, the most gifted of all, we see a beauty, a genius, and a woman unusually charming and attractive, thrown, before she was sixteen, into the society of the magnificent, licentious court of Louis XV. Married to a dissipated, bourgeois spendthrift, for whom she had never cared; sought after, flattered, and worshipped in all the great courts of Europe; courted by fascinating, unscrupulous men of the highest rank, without the protection of family connections and an assured [viii] position; yet her religious principles, exalted character, and passionate devotion to her art, carried her unscathed and honoured through a life of extraordinary dangers and temptations.CHAPTER III