FORE:She found La Fayette as usual very affectionate to her, very much opposed to their emigrating, quite confident in the virtues of the mob, who were burning, robbing, and murdering all over the country, and whose idol he still was.
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FORE:When the Comtesse de Custine died, after a short illness, her husband was away with his regiment, and did not arrive in time to see her alive. During the first days of his despair, while looking over her papers, he came upon a packet of letters which proved beyond all doubt the infamous treachery of the Vicomte, who had made his pretended love for Mme. de Genlis a shield to hide his real passion for his brothers wife, which had been the horror and torment of her life, and which she had dreaded to reveal to her husband, whose temper was violent when aroused.The social existence of Mme. de Genlis, writes Mme. dAbrants, [115] is always a problem difficult to resolve; it is composed of a mass of contradictions, one more extraordinary than the other. Of a noble family, whose name and alliances gave her the right to be chanoinesse of the Chapter of Alix, she was called until her marriage Comtesse de Lancy. She married M. de Genlis, a man of high rank, nearly related to most of the great families in the kingdom, and yet Mme. de Genlis had never in society the attitude of a grande dame.... The important part this woman played in the destinies of France is of such a nature that one must notice it, more especially as she denies a mass of facts, the most notorious of the time in which her name is mixed up, ... pretending never to have spoken to men of whom she must not only have been an acquaintance but a friend. Long before the first outbursts of the Revolution, Mme. de Genlis helped to prepare the influence which afterwards burst like an accursed bomb, covering with its splinters even the woman who had prepared the wick and perhaps lighted the match.
