“The tyrant is no more! Robespierre is dead!”
Mme. de Genlis some time afterwards married her niece, Henriette de Sercey, to a rich merchant in Hamburg, after which she went to Berlin, but where she was denounced to the King, accused, without truth, of receiving the Abbé de Sieyès, then in Berlin, and ordered to leave the Prussian territory.
Then she went back to Hamburg, where she found her niece happy and prosperous, and where Lady Edward Fitzgerald, who was always devoted to her, came to pay her a visit, greatly to her delight.
Next she went to Holstein with M. de Valence who left her in an old castle, with the owners of which she formed an intimate friendship, and after staying there some weeks she took rooms in a farm in the neighbourhood where she lived for a considerable time; she had with her then as companion a young girl called Jenny, to whom she was much attached, and who nursed her devotedly through an illness.
Thus she wandered from place to place during the rest of her nine years of exile, generally under an assumed name; going now and then to Berlin, after the King’s death, and to Hamburg, which was full of emigrés, but where she met M. de Talleyrand and others of her own friends. Shunned and denounced by many, welcomed by others, she made many friends of different grades, from the brother and sister-in-law of the King of Denmark to worthy Mme. Plock, where she lodged in Altona, and the good farmer in Holstein, in whose farmhouse she lived. The storms and troubles of her life did not subdue her spirits; she was always ready for a new friendship, enjoying society, but able to do without it; taking an interest in everything, walking about the country in all weathers, playing the harp, reading, teaching a little boy she had adopted and called Casimir, and writing books by which she easily supported herself and increased her literary reputation.
It was in the year 1801 that she received permission to return to France.
Taking leave of her friends, who implored her not to leave them, she started for Brussels, accompanied by her niece Henriette and Pamela, who went part of the way with her. At Antwerp she met her son-in-law, M. de Lawoestine, who had been to visit her when she was living in Holstein. With her two sons-in-law she was always on the most friendly and affectionate terms.
At Brussels she found her nephew, César Ducrest, and, after nine years’ separation, was reunited to her daughter, who accompanied her to Paris.