ONE:She had only to choose amongst the great personages who wanted their portraits painted; and she spent the time when she was not working in wandering amid the scenes to visit which had been the dream of her life. Ruins of temples, baths, acqueducts, tombs, and monuments of the vanished Empire, gorgeous churches and palaces of the Renaissance, huge never-ending galleries of statues and pictures, the glories of Greek and of medi?val art; Phidias and Praxiteles, Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, and Leonardo; the picturesque beauty of Rome, as it was then, the delicious gardens, since swept away by the greedy vandalism of their owners; the mighty Colosseum; the solemn desolate Campagna; all filled her mind and imagination and distracted her thoughts from France and the horrors going on there. At Rome in those days there certainly seemed to be everything that could be wished for to make life a paradise upon earth. Besides the natural beauty, the historical and arch?ological interest, and the treasures of art, the magnificence of the ecclesiastical functions, church services, stately processions, and entrancing music were a perpetual delight to her. There is no city in the world, she wrote to a [96] friend, in which one could pass ones time so deliciously as in Rome, even if one were deprived of all the resources of good society.
TWO:She tried to question the gaoler when he brought her breakfast of black bread and boiled beans, but he only put his finger on his lips. Every evening she went down to the courtyard and a stone with a note from Tallien was thrown to her. He had hired an attic close by, and his mother had, under another name, gained the gaoler and his wife. But at the end of a week the gaoler was denounced by the spies of Robespierre, and Trzia transferred to the Carmes.
ONE:Every one betrays the Republic. The citoyen Tallien is granting pardon to aristocrats.
TWO:Your Majesty must know that that young man is extremely shortsighted; here is the proof. And he held out his spectacles, which he had brought.
ONE:[42]
TWO:She dressed, and doing all she could to remove the traces of tears, she prepared, in spite of her husbands remonstrances, to go to her sister, sat with her, talked with apparent cheerfulness, but exhausted by the effort, fell fainting to the ground, when she left her room.She also was thrown very early into society; but she entered it as a member of one of the greatest families in France, surrounded by an immense number of relations of the highest character and position.