“I neither give my children Fairy Tales to read nor Arabian Nights; not even Madame d’Aulnoy’s Fables, which were composed for this purpose. There is scarcely one of them which has a moral tendency.”
To provide works “proper for infancy” she wrote Les Veillées du Château,[80] tales which carry Rousseau’s theories along a facile stream of conversation and incident. Adèle, until she is seven, is allowed to read no other books. “I shall then”, says Madame de Genlis, “give her the Conversations of Emilie, a book you have often heard me praise, and this will employ her till she is eight.”
The apparent generosity to her rival, however, did not prevent the writer of Adèle et Théodore from attributing the success of Emilie to the good will of the Encyclopædists. “Madame d’Epinay was a philosopher,” she remarks, “and took good care not to talk of religion to her Emilie.”
It is certainly true that Madame de Genlis had many qualifications for her task which Madame d’Epinay lacked; and when for a moment she allows herself to forget her theories, there are glimpses of autobiography in her books. Her own life, in fact, was the most interesting of her tales, and the rest are interesting chiefly for reflections of it.
No child could have reproached Madame de Genlis with never playing at anything. She had an extraordinary childhood, and her early years in the quiet Château of St. Aubin were filled with unusual interests.[81] At eight years old she dictated little romances and comedies to her governess, and amused herself by playing schoolmistress to some Burgundian peasant children who came to cut rushes under her window; at eleven she was the chief attraction of her mother’s theatrical fêtes. It was characteristic of the society of the day to seek refuge in private theatres from political and social realities; most owners of country houses had their own companies composed of friends and neighbours, and thus Félicie, before her twelfth year, had mixed freely with gentlefolk and villagers, and had shown the aptitude for teaching and acting which marked her whole career. Her dramatic talent, indeed, might be said to cover all her other activities, for with her, teaching was little more than a favourite and particularly successful rôle. She was active, curious and enterprising as any child; before her marriage she was an accomplished harpist and fluent writer; afterwards she acquired a knowledge of literature, anatomy, music and flower-painting; but there were other occupations which fitted her even better to be the exponent of Rousseau’s theories. Writing in the Memoirs of her early married life, “I endeavoured”, she says, “to gain some insight into field-labour an gardening. I went to see the cider made. I went to watch all the workmen in the village at work, the carpenter, the weaver, the basket maker”.
Rousseau thought her the most natural and cheerful girl he had ever met. Their friendship was short, but she never wavered in her loyalty to his teaching, and could say at the age of seventy, “What I pride myself on, is knowing twenty trades, by all of which I could earn my bread.”
In 1777, Madame de Genlis was made governess to the daughters of the Duchess of Chartres, for whom, with her own children, she established a school at the Convent of Belle Chasse. Her success was so great that, in 1782, the Duke of Orleans took the unusual step of appointing her as “governor” to his three sons. The result fully justified his courage and silenced the critics who ridiculed this new method of using revolutionary theory to educate princes.
The Duke purchased a country estate at St. Leu, and here the boys made experiments in chemistry, studied botany, practised gardening, carpentry, and other forms of handwork. But Madame de Genlis did more than play the part of Rousseau with three Emiles. She handed on to her pupils the delights of her own childhood. These boys could laugh at Emile marooned in his island. They played out a dozen different Voyages in the park of St. Leu; and had a theatre of their own in which they acted moral plays from the Théâtre d’Education.[82]
Madame de Genlis had long ago added authorship to her list of trades and had written stories for the children of Belle Chasse. It was easy enough to invent new ones for St. Leu. “There is no great wisdom required in the composition,” she declared, “but only Nature and common sense.”
Doubtless her books deserved Madame Guizot’s criticism, “toujours bien et jamais mieux”. She is discursive, even garrulous, and often loses the thread of the story in moral dialogues; but there are tales in the Veillées du Château that suggest her own enjoyment of the “delicious life” with her children; and if none of them betray her love of mischief and adventure, it is but a fresh proof that she was acting a part, that she could not move freely under the cloak of the Infallible Parent. For in actual life she could take either side in a moral contrast, bear her part in the maddest pranks, assume every virtue of a heroine and hide with complete success a thousand faults.