But her household difficulties were serious. Any persons who have passed their youth in ease and comfort, and then find themselves obliged to arrange their lives upon a totally different scale, will understand this. The petty economies which their soul abhors, the absurd mistakes they continually make, often with disastrous results, the perplexity caused by few and incompetent servants, and the doubt as to whether, after all, their expenses will not exceed their resources, hang like millstones round their inexperienced necks in any case.
But she knew all the details of their fate; she had seen M. Grelet and Father Carrichon, who had gone to the scaffold first with their great uncle and aunt, de Mouchy, then with her grandmother, mother, and sister. In the prison of Plessis she had found her cousin, the Duchesse de Duras, daughter of the de Mouchy, and they had consoled each other under the awful calamity that each had undergone. Only a few days more and the Noailles would have been, like their uncle, the Marquis de Noailles, youngest brother of the Duc dAyen, saved by the death of Robespierre. The Duchesse de Duras was at once liberated with the rest; but the spite and hatred of Legendre, governor of Plessis, against the very name of La Fayette, caused Adrienne to be detained until the exertions of Mme. de Duras procured her freedom.
FORE:The Imperial family, with whom she soon became well acquainted, consisted of the Tsarevitch, afterwards Paul I., his wife, Marie of Wurtemburg, a tall, fair, noble-looking woman, whom every one liked and respected, their sons, the wives of the two elder ones, and their daughters.A discussion was going on about the great difficulty of proving a descent sufficiently pure to gain admittance into the order of the Knights of Malta.
The Comit de salut public was composed of Barre, Carnot, Couthon, Billaud-Varennes, Collot-dHerbois, Robert Lindet, Prieur, Jean-Bon Saint-Andr, Saint-Just, and Maximilian Robespierre; as bloodthirsty a gang of miscreants as ever held an unfortunate country in their grip.On the morning of the 4th Thermidor a dagger had been mysteriously sent to Tallien, without a word of explanation. No one knew who had brought it; there it was upon his table. But he knew the dagger, and what it meant. It was a Spanish poignard which belonged to Trzia. It was then that he went and made his last and useless appeal to Robespierre. Trzia had again been removed to La Force, and on the 7th Thermidor he received a letter from her.I was of no party, she writes, but that of religion. I desired the reform of certain abuses, and I saw with joy the demolition of the Bastille, the abolition of lettres de cachet, and droits de chasse. That was all I wanted, my politics did not go farther than that. At the same time no one saw with more grief and horror than I, the excesses committed from the first moments of the taking of the Bastille.... The desire to let my pupils see everything led me on this occasion into imprudence, and caused me to spend some hours in Paris to see from the Jardin de Beaumarchais the people of Paris demolishing the Bastille. I also had a curiosity to see the Cordeliers Club.... I went there and I saw the orators, cobblers, and porters with their wives and mistresses, mounting the tribune and shouting against nobles, priests, and rich people.... I remarked a fishwoman.... This pretty spectacle to which she was said to have taken her pupils, was, of course, approved of by the Duke of Orlans, who made the Duc de Chartres a member of the Jacobin Club, by the wish of the Duc dOrlans, assuredly not by mine; but, however, it must be remembered that that society was not then what it afterward became, [416] although its sentiments were already very exaggerated. However, it was a pretext employed to estrange the Duchess of Orlans from me.
