THREE:Unscrupulous, heartless, remorseless, yet he was a saint and angel compared to the frantic, raving, blood-stained miscreants whom he had displaced, and whose work he was now occupied in undoing as fast as he could.A crowd began to gather, and he went on in a loud voice
THREE:Mme. Le Brun now worked so hard that she made herself ill, often having three sittings a day, and she soon became so thin and out of health that her friends interfered, and by order of the doctor she henceforth, after working all the morning and dining in the middle of the day, took a siesta, which she found invaluable all her life. The evenings were always devoted to society.Nobody could feel sure when they got up in the morning that they would go safely to bed at night; the slightest offence given to the Emperor meant imprisonment or Siberia, and his orders were so preposterous that it was difficult not to offend him.
THREE:The King, after the death of Mme. de Pompadour, of whom he had become tired, lived for some years without a reigning favourite, in spite of the attempts of various ladies of the court to attain to that post. His life was passed in hunting, in the festivities of the court, and in a constant succession of intrigues and liaisons for which the notorious Parc aux cerfs was a sort of preserve. His next and last recognised and powerful mistress was Mme. Du Barry.They received Mme. Le Brun very kindly, and she next went to see the Comtesse de Provence, for the second and third brothers, the Counts of Provence and Artois, had taken refuge at their sisters court.
THREE:No sooner had the news of their first ephemeral [298] successes at Longwy and Verdun arrived at Paris, and at the same time the rising in La Vende become known, than there was a rush to arms, to the frontier, to drive back the invaders from the soil of France. The revolutionists seized their opportunity to declare that the royalists left in France would help the invaders by conspiring at home. It was enough. The thirst for blood and slaughter, never equalled or approached by any other civilised nation, which characterised the French Revolution, burst forth with unheard of atrocity. The September massacres were the result, and of the order for this horrible crime Tallien and Danton were chiefly accused.
THREE:But the woods, the meadows, the Seine, and the general beauty of the landscape delighted Mme. Le Brun, who, after all her wanderings, began to have a longing for rest, became more and more attached to her home as the years passed, and spent more and more of her time there.
THREE:I have to go there as a judge to hear all the rubbish and gossip you can imagine for forty-eight hours.
THREE:Just after the September massacres Mme. de Genlis received a letter from the Duc dOrlans desiring her to bring his daughter back to France at once, to which she replied that she should do nothing of the sort, and that it would be absurd to choose such a time for entering France.Only a terrorist could speak so!
THREE:There Pauline had a son, and to her great joy he and the children she afterwards had lived to grow up. The farm Mme. de Tess wished for was called Wittmold, and lay at the other side of the lake upon a plain covered with pasture and ponds, as far as the eye could reach. The house stood on a promontory jutting out into the lake, and was surrounded by fields, apple trees, and pine woods. They crossed the lake in boats, and established themselves there. They could live almost entirely upon the produce of the place, for there was plenty of game, plenty of fish in the lake: the dairy farm paid extremely well, the pasture produced rich, delicious milk; they had a hundred and twenty cows, and made enormous quantities of butter, which they sold at Hamburg. It was pleasant enough in the summer, but in winter the lake was frozen, the roads covered with snow, and the cold wind from the Baltic raved round the house. However, they were thankful for the shelter of a home that most of their friends would have envied, and they lived peacefully there for four years, during which Pauline organised and carried on a great work of charity which, with the assistance of one or two influential friends, soon spread all over Europe. It was a kind of society with branches in different countries, to collect subscriptions for the relief of the French exiles, and it involved an enormous amount of letter-writing, for, if the subscriptions poured into Wittmold, so did letters of entreaty, appealing for help. But Pauline was indefatigable not only in allotting the different sums of money, [255] but in finding employment, placing young girls as governesses, selling drawings and needlework, &c.The two sisters had not met since the interview at the inn during the triumphal progress of the La Fayette. It was a mercy that Pauline had not believed in their Utopia nor taken their advice. Even now Adrienne was only exchanging one [252] prison for another, for she was shortly going to Austria to obtain leave to share that of La Fayette.