From this time began her brilliant career. Essentially a woman of the world, delighting in society and amusement, though always praising the pleasures of solitude and retirement, she entered the household of the Duchesse d’Orléans, wife of the infamous Philippe-Égalité, and while constantly declaiming against ambition managed to get all her relations lucrative posts at the Palais Royal, and married one if not both her daughters to rich men of rank with notoriously bad reputations.
Perpetually proclaiming her religious principles and loyalty to the throne, she was suspected of being concerned in the disgraceful libels and attacks upon the Queen, was on terms of friendship with some of the worst of the revolutionists, rejoiced in the earliest outbreaks of the beginning of the Revolution, and while she educated the Orléans children with a pompous parade of virtue and strictness, was generally and probably rightly looked upon as the mistress of their father.
She was a strange character, full of artificial sentiment, affectation, and self-deception, and, unlike the first three heroines of this book, the mystery and doubts which hung over her have never been cleared up.
Against the saintly Marquise de Montagu no breath of scandal could ever be spoken. Such calumnies as were spread against Mme. Le Brun, the work of the revolutionists, who hated her only for her religion and loyalty, never believed by those whose opinion would be worthy of consideration, soon vanished and were forgotten.
The liaisons of Mme. Tallien had nothing doubtful about them.
But the stories against Mme. de Genlis have never been cleared up. Much that was said about her was undoubtedly false, but there remain serious accusations which can neither be proved nor disproved; and that a long, intimate friendship between a prince of the character of Philippe-Égalité and a young, attractive woman who was governess to his children should have been no more than a platonic one, passes the bounds of credibility.
The history of Mme. de Genlis in the emigration differs from the other two, for having contrived to make herself obnoxious both to royalists and republicans her position was far worse than theirs.
But the deep affection she and her pupils displayed for each other, the devotion and kindness she showed them during their misfortunes, the courage and cheerfulness with which she bore the hardships and dangers of her lot, and the remorse and self-reproach which, in spite of the excellent opinion she usually entertained of herself, do occasionally appear in her memoirs, prove that many good qualities existed amongst so much that was faulty.
As to her writings, then so much in vogue, they were mostly works intended either to explain, assist, or illustrate the system of education which was the hobby of her life and which, if one may judge by “Adèle et Théodore,” one of the most important of her tales, can only be called preposterous.