They were not, according to the general custom, sent to a convent, but brought up at home under her constant supervision. The frequent absence of the Duke, who was usually either at Versailles or with the army, [70] left them to her undivided care. They [184] had an excellent governess, but the Duchess herself superintended their studies, they went to mass with her every morning at the Jacobins or St. Roch, dined with her at three oclock, and spent always some time afterwards in her room, which was very large, was hung with crimson and gold damask, and contained an immense bed.
I have received some news which fills me with joy; I hear the King has escaped from France, and I have just written to him, only addressingTo His Majesty the King of France. They will know very well where to find him, she added smiling.One night, at a masked ball, a young man accidentally in a crowd pushed against a woman, who cried out.
ONE:Mesdames Adla?de and Victoire set off early in 1791. Their whole journey was a perpetual danger. After getting their passports signed with difficulty by the Commune, they were denounced at Svres by a maid-servant, stopped by the Jacobins and accused of being concerned in plots and of taking money out of the country, and detained for a fortnight, when they managed to get permission to go on, and left at 10 oclock on a Saturday night, arriving on Sunday morning at Fontainebleau, where they were again stopped and threatened by the mob, who were just going to be joined by the gardes nationaux when a hundred Chasseurs de Lorraine, luckily quartered there, charged the mob, opened the gates, and passed the carriages on. At Arnay-le-Duc they were detained for eleven days, and only allowed to proceed when the Comte de Narbonne appeared with a permission extorted by [108] Mirabeau from the revolutionary government at Paris.We are not blind, said Tallien. We only strike the enemies of the Republic.
THREE:THE next day was the divorce. M. de Fontenay hurried away towards the Pyrenees and disappeared from France and from the life and concerns of the woman who had been his wife.
THREE:In the Souvenirs, written in after years, when her ideas and principles had been totally changed by her experience of the Revolution, the beginning of which had so delighted her, she was evidently ashamed of the line she had taken, and anxious to explain it away as far as possible.
But with regard to dates Mme. de Genlis is exceedingly inaccurate; in fact her statements are sometimes impossible. For instance, she says that they left Mons the 13th of April, arriving at Schaffhausen on the 26th of May, and that their journey took seven days! Also that they arrived at Schaffhausen on the 26th of May, and then that they left that place for Zurich on May 6th ... and went to Zug May 14. At any rate they appear to have been there late in May. The Duchess [131] was then in the prison of the Luxembourg, and the Duke and his two younger sons were imprisoned at Marseilles.Besides the immense number of her friends and acquaintance of later years, she kept up faithfully those of her early days. Her old fellow student, Mlle. Boquet, had given up the profession in which she was getting on so well, and married a M. Filleul, whom the Queen had made her concierge de la Muette. [31]CHAPTER VIIIAt the same time Tallien recognised the Marquise de Fontenay.
