This is what the world of letters would have lost,--society
would have lost a very different thing.
Such a nose as never was possessed before; a nose modelled by Love
himself, and celebrated by ten court poets, and which the censer of
praise was as unable to improve as a certain tumble which its owner had
in infancy. Hands the most beautiful that could be, and which Madame de
Genlis put up for exhibition during twenty years, upon the strings of
a harp, now passed into a proverb. A form without fault, and which made
the delight of the Palais Royal parties in the open air. A foot, alike
triumphant at the Court and at the _Porcherons_. Eyes capable of
making an impression upon the running footman of M. de Brancas, and of
an innumerable crowd of dukes, lawyers, officers, and men of letters.
A genius!--oh! for her genius, if she had not been encumbered with
so much modesty, Madame de Genlis would have shone by it alone in the
_first_ rank; through feminine modesty she remained in the second.
Philosophy may breathe again. The author of "The Evenings at the Castle"
was the Attila of philosophers;--she crushed Voltaire, considering him
as a _mauvais sujet_; pursued Diderot and d'Alembert; breasted
Rousseau; refuted the Encyclopaedia; and was always of the party in
favour of the Altar and the Throne, excepting only the clay when the
revolution of 1789 commenced.
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