please, and seated us in fauteuils near the fire. I then had a full view of her face and figure. She looked like the full-length picture of my great-grandmother Edgeworth you may have seen in the garret, very thin and melancholy, but her face not so handsome as my grandmother's; dark eyes, long sallow cheeks, compressed thin lips, two or three black ringlets on a high forehead, a cap that Mrs. Grier might wear—altogether an appearance of fallen fortunes, worn-out health, and excessive but guarded irritability. To me there was nothing of that engaging, captivating manner which I had been taught to expect by many even of her enemies. She seemed to me to be alive only to literary quarrels and jealousies; the muscles of her face as she spoke, or my father spoke to her, quickly and too easily expressed hatred and anger whenever any not of her own party were mentioned. She is now, you know, devote acharnée. When I mentioned with some enthusiasm the good Abbé Morellot, who has written so courageously in favour of the French exiled nobility and their children, she answered in a sharp voice, "Oui, c'est un homme de beaucoup d'esprit, à ce qu'on dit, à ce que je crois même, mais il faut vous apprendre qu'il n'est pas des Nôtres." My father spoke of Pamela, Lady Edward Fitzgerald, and explained how he had defended her in the Irish House of Commons. Instead of being pleased and touched, her mind instantly diverged into an elaborate and artificial exculpation of Lady Edward and herself, proving, or attempting to prove, that she never knew any of her husband's plans; that she utterly disapproved of them, at least of all she suspected of them. This defence was quite lost upon us, who never thought of attacking; but Madame de Genlis seems to have been so much used to be attacked that she has defences and apologies ready prepared, suited to all possible occasions. She spoke of Madame de Staël's Delphine with detestation; of another new and fashionable novel, Amélie, with abhorrence, and kissed my forehead twice because I had not read it, "Vous autres Anglaises, vous êtes modestes!" Where was Madame de Genlis' sense of delicacy when she penned and published Les Chevaliers du Cigne? Forgive, my dear Aunt Mary. You begged me to see her with favourable eyes, and I went to see her after seeing her Rosiere de Salency, with the most favourable disposition, but I could not like her. There was something of malignity in her countenance and conversation that repelled love, and of hypocrisy which annihilated esteem; and from time to time I saw, or thought I saw, through the gloom of her countenance, a gleam of coquetry.[1] But my father
- ↑ A contemporary epigram ran thus:—
La Genlis se consume en efforts superflus,
La vertu n'en veut pas; le vice n'en veut plus."
