TWO:Brussels was crowded with refugees, many of them almost destitute, who sold everything they had, gave lessons in languages, history, mathematics, writing, even riding, but there was so much competition that they got very little.The abbey was very beautiful, and there were more than a hundred nuns besides the lay sisters and the pensionnaires (children and young girls being educated there).
TWO:Mme. de Genlis was very happy at the Arsenal with Casimir and a little boy named Alfred, whom she had adopted.His was the leading salon of Paris at that time, and Mme. Tallien was the presiding genius there. Music, dancing, and gambling were again the rage, the women called themselves by mythological names and wore costumes so scanty and transparent that they were scarcely any use either for warmth or decency; marriages, celebrated by a civic functionary, were not considered binding, and were frequently and quickly followed by divorce. Society, if such it could be called, was a wild revel of disorder, licence, debauchery, and corruption; while over all hung, like a cloud, the gloomy figures of Billaud-Varennes, Collot dHerbois, Barre, and their Jacobin followers, ready at any moment to bring back the Terror.
