“Monsieur le Comte, your husband, will lose his head on the scaffold; you will leave France to live without resources in a foreign land; you will work for your living, but after long years of exile you will return to France. You will marry an ambassador, but you will have other vicissitudes.”
Such prophecies in the height of their prosperity seemed so absurd that they laughed, gave the wizard a large fee, and returned home, thinking the whole adventure very amusing.
However, the predictions were fulfilled. Mme. de Marigny, after many misfortunes, died young. The Comte de Flahault was guillotined during the Terror, and the Comtesse escaped with her son to England, where she lived in great poverty in a village near London, until a friend of hers, the Marquis ——, also an emigré, suggested to her that she should write a novel. That same night she began “Adèle de Senanges,” which she sold for £100 to a publisher in London, and after which she continued by her writing to support herself and educate her boy at a good English school. When she returned to France she lived at a small hôtel in an out-of-the-way part of Paris until she married M. de Souza, the Portuguese Ambassador.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] “Carle” or Charles Vernet, son of the landscape and marine painter Joseph, was a figure painter and father of Horace Vernet the battle painter.
[13] The Queen, Marie Leczinska, died 1768.
[14] Grandson of Louis XV., afterwards Louis XVI. His father the Dauphin, died 1765.
[15] Daughters of Louis XV.
[16] “Souvenirs de Mme. Vigée Le Brun,” t. 1, p. 48.
[17] “Souvenirs d’un Sexagenaire” (Arnault).