Among the Palais Royal set, it was the fashion to find fault with everything done by the royalists, to go as seldom as possible to Versailles and to pretend to find it a great bore when it was necessary to do so.The Count and Countess were kind, excellent people, who had just brought with them a poor old emigrant priest, and another younger one, whom they had picked up on the road after he had escaped from the massacre of the bridge of Beauvoisin. They had only a carriage with two places, but they had put the old man between them and the young one behind the carriage, and had taken the greatest care of them.To this she looked forward with some trepidation, being dreadfully afraid of Mme. de Puisieux, who at first did not like her, and was extremely stiff. She drove down to Versailles in her carriage alone with her, Mme. de Puisieux saying very little, but criticising the way she did her hair. They slept at Versailles, in the splendid apartment of the Marchal dEtre, who was very kind and pleasant to Flicit, and with whom she felt more at home. The next day she was obliged to spend such an enormous time at her toilette that by the time they started she was nearly tired out. Her hair was dressed three times over; everything was [376] the object of some tiresome fuss, to which policy obliged her to submit in silence.The lofty asceticism of her theories and practice was perhaps almost too severe for ordinary mortals living in the world, and in some respects better adapted for a monastic than a secular life; her emigration, so long delayed, was no time of success and happiness: long years of terror, danger, poverty, fearful trials, and sorrows endured with heroic fortitude and angelic patience, passed before she was restored to France and to the ancient castle which was the home and refuge of her later life.The marriages accordingly took place when Louise was sixteen and Adrienne fifteen years old.Adrienne had brought Pauline a copy of their mothers will, and, not being an emigre, had taken possession of the castle and estate of Lagrange, left to herself. She only spent a short time at Altona, and started for Austria.