“Then you know Mme. Le Brun very well, Monsieur?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“Well, that is very strange,” she observed; “because I am Mme. Le Brun, whom you have calumniated, and I now see you for the first time in my life.”
At this he rose, his legs seeming to tremble under him, and taking his hat he left the room and was seen no more, for in consequence of this he was excluded from all the best houses.
When the Empress returned from Czarskoiesolo she desired Mme. Le Brun to paint the portraits of the Grand Duchesses Alexandrine and Helena, daughters of the Tsarevitch, then fourteen and thirteen years old, and afterwards that of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, wife of Alexander, eldest grandson of the Empress, the young girl she had seen on her first visit to Czarskoiesolo, by whom she was completely fascinated.
The Imperial family, with whom she soon became well acquainted, consisted of the Tsarevitch, afterwards Paul I., his wife, Marie of Wurtemburg, a tall, fair, noble-looking woman, whom every one liked and respected, their sons, the wives of the two elder ones, and their daughters.
They were all entirely under the domination of the Empress, against whose will nobody dared to rebel, though Paul as a child used to ask his tutor why his father had been killed and why his mother wore the crown which ought to have been his.
He was the only one of the Imperial family Lisette was at all afraid of, for the Empress was unceasingly good to her, and the princes and princesses were all very young.
Alexander, afterwards Alexander I., resembled his mother in beauty and charm of character; but Constantine was like his father, whose eccentric, gloomy disposition seemed to foreshadow the fate which lay before him. His strange, unbalanced nature alternated between good and evil; capricious and violent, he was yet capable of kindness and generosity.
Constantine, although very young, was married to the Princess Anne of Coburg, of whom Mme. Le Brun remarked that without being so lovely as the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, she was still very pretty, very lively, and only sixteen years old. She was not happy with Constantine, from whom she separated after a time and went back to her own family.