[Original]
What might make us doubt the truth of the anecdote is primarily the character of the author who related it to us. Madame de Genlis made a travesty of everything: the past, the present and even the future. She put romanticism and romance into her own existence as well as that of others; whether it is a question of events of which she was witness or of those which she relates from hearsay, it is never prudent to accept her word without confirmation.
Let us apply the test. Neither in the memoirs nor in the letters of the first half of the eighteenth century have I discovered an allusion to the intrigue of one of the sisters of M. le Due with the gentleman whom a stag mortally wounded in the forest of Chantilly on August 30, 1724. I have questioned the man who today best knows the history of Chantilly, M. Gustav Macon: he told me that he has never met a mention of the adventure of Mlle, de Clermont before 1802, the date at which Madame de Genlis published her novel.
We do not know much about the pretty naiad painted by Nattier. We know the charm of her features and we know that Montesquieu wrote for her the Temple de Guide, "with no other aim than to make a poetic picture of voluptuousness." But an anecdote told by Duclos will show us a person somewhat different from the heroine of Madame de Genlis. When the marriage of Louis XV with Marie Leczinska was decided upon, the Due d'Antin was sent to Strasbourg as an envoy to the Polish princess. He pronounced in these circumstances a discourse in which, with singular lack of tact, he found it necessary to make an allusion to the project which M. le Duc had recently conceived of marrying the King to the youngest of his sisters, Mlle, de Sens: the King, he said, having to choose between the Graces and Virtues, had taken the latter. Mile, de Clermont, superintendent of the future household of the Queen, heard this remark: "Apparently," she said, "d'Antin takes us, my sisters and myself, for prostitutes." This is not the tone of the romance of Madame de Genlis.
[Original]
Madame de Tracy relates that one day she read Mademoiselle de Clermont and wept for a solid hour. Madame de Coigny then said to her: "But all that is not true." Madame de Tracy answered: "What has that to do with it, if it seems true?" And Madame de Tracy was right.... Today it seems a little less true, and I do not promise my female readers, if they take the fancy of reading Mademoiselle de Clermont, that they will weep for an hour. It is even possible that in certain places they might have more desire to laugh than to weep. Nevertheless, it is a pleasant bit to read under the trees of Chantilly, this tiny romance printed by Didot, and which Desenne illustrated with fine and childish little designs, where we see gentlemen in wigs and ladies in curls in surroundings of Empire style; a lovable and opportune anachronism, for it has marvelously translated the character of this sentimental novel, which never had any history back of it.