In Paulines family those who, like herself and those about her, got out of the country, were safe from everything but the poverty caused partly by their own improvidence. But of those who remained there was scarcely one who escaped death or the horrors of a revolutionary prison. Only M. and Mme. de Grammont had managed to keep quiet in a distant part of the country, and, of course, at the peril of their lives.
Director
On Sunday, April 19, 1795, therefore, she left Vienna and went by Prague to Dresden, where she was of course enraptured with the world-famed gallery, and above all with the chef d?uvre of Raffaelle, the Madonna di San Sistothat vision of beauty before which every other seems dim and pale. She spent five days at Berlin, stayed a few [123] days more at the castle of her old friend Prince Henry of Prussia, and arrived at St. Petersburg late in July, very tired and exhausted with the journey in an uncomfortable carriage over roads so bad that she was jolted and flung about from one great stone to another from Riga to St. Petersburg, until her only longing was to be quiet and rest.Mme. de Boisgeloup, however, received the children with the greatest kindness, her two boys were companions for the young Cabarrus, and as for Trzia, she loved and treated her like a daughter. They lived in the rue dAnjou, and when the following year her father arrived at Paris and bought a h?tel in the place des Victoires she still spent less of her time with him than with her.But the deep affection she and her pupils displayed for each other, the devotion and kindness she showed them during their misfortunes, the courage and cheerfulness with which she bore the hardships and dangers of her lot, and the remorse and self-reproach which, in spite of the excellent opinion she usually entertained of herself, do occasionally appear in her memoirs, prove that many good qualities existed amongst so much that was faulty.Though he painted this portrait in haste, with tears in his eyes, it was one of the best ever done by Isabey. [35]