judges much more favourably of her than I do; she evidently took pains to please him, and he says he is sure she is a person over whose mind he could gain great ascendancy. He thinks her a woman of violent passions, unbridled imagination, and ill-tempered, but not malevolent; one who has been so torn to pieces that she now turns upon her enemies, and longs to tear in her turn. He says she has certainly great powers of pleasing, though I certainly neither saw nor felt them. But you know, my dear aunt, that I am not famous for judging sanely of strangers on a first visit, and I might be prejudiced or mortified by Madame de Genlis assuring me that she had never read anything of mine except Belinda, had heard of Practical Education, and heard it much praised, but had never seen it. She has just published an additional volume of her Petits Romans, in which there are some beautiful stories; but you must not expect another Mademoiselle de Clermont—one such story in an age is as much as one can reasonably expect.
I had almost forgotten to tell you that the little girl who showed us in is a girl whom she is educating. "Elle m'appelle Maman, mais elle n'est pas ma fille." The manner in which this little girl spoke to Madame de Genlis, and looked at her, appeared to me more in her favour than anything else. She certainly spoke to her with freedom and fondness, and without any affectation. I went to look at what the child was writing: she was translating Darwin's Zoonomia. I read some of the translation. It was excellent; she was, I think she said, ten years old. It is certain that Madame de Genlis made the present Duke of Orleans[1] such an excellent mathematician that when he was, during his emigration, in distress for bread, he taught mathematics as a professor in one of the German universities. If we could see or converse with one of her pupils, and hear what they think of her, we should be able to form a better judgment than from all that her books and her enemies say for or against her. I say her books, not her friends and enemies, for I fear she has no friends to plead for her except her books. I never met anyone of any party who was her friend. This strikes me with real melancholy, to see a woman of the first talents in Europe, who had lived and shone in the gay court of the gayest nation in the world, now deserted and forlorn, living in wretched lodgings, with some of the pictures and finery—the wreck of her fortunes—before her eyes; without society, without a single friend, admired—and despised: she lived literally in spite, not in pity. Her cruelty in drawing a profligate character of the Queen,
- ↑ Afterwards King Louis Philippe. It was at a Swiss school that he taught, not at a German university.
