Among the Palais Royal set, it was the fashion to find fault with everything done by the royalists, to go as seldom as possible to Versailles and to pretend to find it a great bore when it was necessary to do so.
If a play was popular at Versailles it was sure to be hissed at Paris; a disgraced minister was the idol of the mob; the only liveries not insulted were those of Orléans.
For the Duc d’Orléans was aiming at the crown, and it is impossible to believe Mme. de Genlis was not aware of it. He suggested to the Queen that Madame Royale should be married to his eldest son, which proposal Marie Antoinette decidedly refused, remarking afterwards that to marry her daughter to the Duc de Chartres would be to sign the death warrant of her son. [120]
Mme. de Genlis states that one evening while the States-General were sitting, the Duc d’Orléans, who was in her salon, declared that they would be of no use and do nothing; not even suppress the lettres de cachet. Mme. de Genlis and the Duc de Lauzun were of a different opinion, and they bet each other fifty louis on the subject. The bet was put into writing and Mme. de Genlis showed it to more than fifty people of her acquaintance, all of whom declared a Revolution to be impossible. The Abbé Cesutti, one of the free-thinking school, was editor of a paper called La feuille villageoise, intended for the people. He asked Mme. de Genlis to write for it, and she sent some papers called “The Letters of Marie-Anne,” in which she introduced doctrines and principles of religion. Soon after the Abbé came and asked her in future only to speak of morality and never to mention religion. Knowing what that meant she declined to write any more for that paper.
However, she was so far identified with the Revolutionary party as not only to rejoice at the infamous attack of the mob upon the Bastille, but to consent to her pupils’ request to take them to Paris to see the mob finishing the destruction of that beautiful and historic monument.
In the “Souvenirs,” written in after years, when her ideas and principles had been totally changed by her experience of the Revolution, the beginning of which had so delighted her, she was evidently ashamed of the line she had taken, and anxious to explain it away as far as possible.
“I was of no party,” she writes, “but that of religion. I desired the reform of certain abuses, and I saw with joy the demolition of the Bastille, the abolition of lettres de cachet, and droits de chasse. That was all I wanted, my politics did not go farther than that. At the same time no one saw with more grief and horror than I, the excesses committed from the first moments of the taking of the Bastille.... The desire to let my pupils see everything led me on this occasion into imprudence, and caused me to spend some hours in Paris to see from the Jardin de Beaumarchais the people of Paris demolishing the Bastille. I also had a curiosity to see the Cordeliers Club.... I went there and I saw the orators, cobblers, and porters with their wives and mistresses, mounting the tribune and shouting against nobles, priests, and rich people.... I remarked a fishwoman....” This pretty spectacle to which she was said to have taken her pupils, was, of course, approved of by the Duke of Orléans, who made the Duc de Chartres a member of the Jacobin Club, “by the wish of the Duc d’Orléans, assuredly not by mine; but, however, it must be remembered that that society was not then what it afterward became, although its sentiments were already very exaggerated. However, it was a pretext employed to estrange the Duchess of Orléans from me.”
And small wonder! Was the Duchess of Orléans—a woman of saintly character and the great grand-daughter [121] of Louis XIV.—to tolerate the governess of her children being seen in a den of blasphemy and low, unspeakable vice and degradation like the Cordeliers Club, or their being themselves shown with rejoicing a scene of horror and murder, and join in the triumph of ruffians who were attacking their religion, and the King and Queen, who were also their own cousins? Was it possible that anybody in their senses would tolerate such a governess? Added to which the Duchess was now aware of the terms on which Mme. de Genlis and the Duke stood to each other. It could no longer be said of her—
“The Duchess sees nothing, or will not see anything, but even shows a strange predilection for Mme. de Genlis, which made Mme. de Barbantane say that it is a love [122] which would make one believe in witchcraft.”
The Duc de Penthièvre, who knew his son-in-law and distrusted Mme. de Genlis, foresaw what would happen and opposed her entrance into the Palais Royal; but the influence of Mme. de Montesson had prevailed, and she was soon not only all-powerful herself, but had placed the different members of her family in lucrative posts there. And, though they did not follow their party to the extreme excesses to which they were already tending, they were, so far, all tarred with the same brush.