She emigrated early, and far from being, as in most cases, a time of poverty and hardship, her exile was one long, triumphant career of prosperity.
Owing to her brilliant success, to the affection and friendship which surrounded her wherever she went, to her absorbing interest in her art, the delightful places and society in which she spent her time, and also to her own sunny, light-hearted nature, her long life, in spite of certain serious domestic drawbacks and sorrows, was a very happy one. Her wonderful capacity for enjoyment, her appreciation of beauty in nature and art, the great interest she took in matters intellectual and political, her pleasure in the society of her numerous friends, and her ardent devotion to the religious and royalist principles of her youth, continued undiminished through the peaceful old age which terminated her brilliant career.
With the same religious and political principles, the conditions of life which surrounded the Marquise de Montagu were totally different. A contrast indeed to the simple, artistic household, the early grief, poverty, and hard work, the odious step-father, the foolish mother, the worthless husband and daughter, the thousand difficulties and disadvantages which beset Mme. Le Brun, were the state and luxury, the sheltered life, the watchful care, and powerful protection bestowed upon the daughter of the house of Noailles; her mother, the saintly, heroic Duchesse d’Ayen, her husband the gallant, devoted Marquis de Montagu.
She also was thrown very early into society; but she entered it as a member of one of the greatest families in France, surrounded by an immense number of relations of the highest character and position.
Neither a genius nor yet possessed of any great artistic or intellectual talent, without worldly ambition, little attracted by the amusements of society, she was a sort of mixture of a grande dame and a saint.
The lofty asceticism of her theories and practice was perhaps almost too severe for ordinary mortals living in the world, and in some respects better adapted for a monastic than a secular life; her emigration, so long delayed, was no time of success and happiness: long years of terror, danger, poverty, fearful trials, and sorrows endured with heroic fortitude and angelic patience, passed before she was restored to France and to the ancient castle which was the home and refuge of her later life.
In Mme. Tallien we have a woman exactly opposite to the other two in character, principles, and conduct. Differing from both of them in birth and circumstances—for she was the daughter of a Spanish banker of large fortune—with extraordinary beauty, the hot, passionate blood of the south, a nature, habits, and principles undisciplined by authority and unrestrained by religion, she was early imbued with the creed of the revolutionists, and carried their theories of atheism and licence to the logical consequences.
Yet the generosity and kindness of her heart, and the number of victims she saved, outweighed, though without effacing, the disorders of her earlier life, [1] during the latter part of which, as the wife of a Catholic, royalist prince, whose love she returned and to whose opinions she was converted, she deeply regretted the errors of Notre Dame de Thermidor.
In Mme. de Genlis we have a fourth and more complex type, a character in which good and evil were so mingled that it was often hard to say which predominated. With less beauty than the other three but singularly attractive, with extraordinary gifts and talents, with noble blood and scarcely any fortune, she spent a childhood of comparative poverty at her father’s château, where she was only half educated, and at seventeen married the young Comte de Genlis, who had no money but was related to most of the great families of the kingdom.