re of a conspiracy with open doors, for the reform of government:
the philosophy of the age there encountered politics and literature: it
was the palace of opinion. Buffon came there constantly to pass the
latter evenings of his life. Rousseau there received at a distance the
only worship which his proud sensitiveness would accept even from
princes. Franklin and the American republicans; Gibbon and the orators
of the English opposition, Grimm and the German philosophers, Diderot,
Sieyes, Sillery, Laclos, Suard, Florian, Raynal, La Harpe, and all the
thinkers or writers who anticipated the new mind, met there with
celebrated artists and _savans_. Voltaire himself, proscribed from
Versailles by the human respect of a court, which admired his genius,
had arrived thither on his last journey. The prince presented to him his
children, one of whom reigns to-day over France. The dying philosopher
blessed them, as he did those of Franklin, in the name of reason and
liberty.

V.

If the prince himself had not a love of literature and a highly refined
mind, he had sufficiently cultivated his mind to appreciate perfectly
the pleasures of the understanding; but the revolutionary feeling
instinctively counselled him to surround himself with all the strength
that might one day serve liberty. Early tired of the beauty and virtue
of the Duchesse d'Orleans, he had conceived for a lovely, witty,
insinuating woman a sentiment which did not enchain the caprices of his
heart, but which controlled his inconsistency and directed his mind.
This woman, then seducing and since celebrated, was the Comtesse de
Sillery-Genlis, daughter of the Marquis Ducret de Saint Aubin, a
gentleman of Charolais, without fortune. Her mother, who was still young
and handsome, had brought her to Paris, to the house of M. de la
Popeliniere, a celebrated financier, whose old age she had taken
captive. She educated her daughter for that doubtful destiny which
awaits women on whom nature has lavished beauty and mind, and to whom
society has refused their right position--adventuresses in society,
sometimes raised, sometimes degraded.

The first masters formed this child by all the arts of mind and
hand--her mother directed her to ambition. The second-rate position of
this mother at the house of her opulent protector, formed the child to
the plasticity and adulation which her mother's domestic condition
required and illustrated. At sixteen years of age her precocious