FORE:Much older than the unfortunate Queen of France, and possessing neither her beauty nor charm, Mme. Le Brun did not take a fancy to her, although she received her very well. She was a strange person, with masculine manners and habits; her great pleasure apparently was riding. Very pale and thin, wearing deep mourning for her brother, the Emperor Joseph II., even her rooms being hung with black, she gave the impression almost of a spectre or a shadow.
Sadly she returned to Aix-la-Chapelle, where the news which she had heard at Lige of the September [233] massacres had already arrived, and where, besides their own horror and grief, the emigrs had to listen to the disgust and contempt everywhere expressed by those of other nations for a country in which such atrocities could be perpetuated without the slightest resistance.The child died at five oclock one morning. At the same hour, she writes, of the same day, I was alone with my nurse, and, raising my eyes to the canopy of my bed, I distinctly saw my son in the form of an angel ... holding out his arms to me. This vision, without exciting any suspicions, caused me great surprise. I rubbed my eyes several times, but always saw the same figure. My mother and M. de Genlis came at about eleven; they were overcome with grief, but I was not surprised, for I [391] knew I was ill enough to make them very anxious. I could not help looking always at the canopy of my bed with a sort of shudder, and my mother, knowing that I was afraid of spiders, asked if I saw one ... at last I said I would not tell them what I saw lest they should think my brain was deranged, but they pressed me until I told them.For the first circulation had been traced to some of his household. He sent away two men in his service, but it was well known that he paid them their wages all the time and soon took them back again.Quite another sort of woman was the Duchesse de Fleury, with whom Lisette formed an intimate friendship. The Duchess, ne Aime de Coigny, was a true type of the women of a certain set at the old French court, and her history was one [98] only possible just at the time in which it took place.She had numbers of orders, and of portraits half finished, but she was too nervous and agitated to paint, and she had a hundred louis which some one had just paid for a pictureto herself fortunately, not to M. Le Brun, who generally took everything, sometimes never even telling her it had been paid, at other times saying he must have the whole sum for an investment, or to pay a bill owing.
