The well-known Abbe Morellet, their
old acquaintance, 'answered for them,' says Miss Edgeworth, and besides
all this Mr Edgeworth's name was well known in scientific circles.
Breguet, Montgolfier, and others all made him welcome. Lord Henry
Petty, as Maria's friend Lord Lansdowne was then called, was in Paris,
and Rogers the poet, and Kosciusko, cured of his wounds. For the first
time they now made the acquaintance of M. Dumont, a lifelong friend and
correspondent. There were many others--the Delesserts, of the French
Protestant faction, Madame Suard, to whom the romantic Thomas Day had
paid court some thirty years before, and Madame Campan, and Madame
Recamier, and Madame de Remusat, and Madame de Houdetot, now seventy-two
years of age, but Rousseau's Julie still, and Camille Jordan, and the
Chevalier Edelcrantz, from the Court of the King of Sweden.

The names alone of the Edgeworths' entertainers represent a delightful
and interesting section of the history of the time. One can imagine
that besides all these pleasant and talkative persons the Faubourg
Saint-Germain itself threw open its great swinging doors to the
relations of the Abbe Edgeworth who risked his life to stand by his
master upon the scaffold and to speak those noble warm-hearted words,
the last that Louis ever heard. One can picture the family party as
it must have appeared with its pleasant British looks--the agreeable
'ruddy-faced' father, the gentle Mrs. Edgeworth, who is somewhere
described by her stepdaughter as so orderly, so clean, so freshly
dressed, the child of fifteen, only too beautiful and delicately
lovely, and last of all Maria herself, the nice little unassuming,
Jeannie-Deans-looking body Lord Byron described, small, homely, perhaps,
but with her gift of French, of charming intercourse, her fresh laurels
of authorship (for 'Belinda' was lately published), her bright animation,
her cultivated mind and power of interesting all those in her company,
to say nothing of her own kindling interest in every one and every thing
round about her.

Her keen delights and vivid descriptions of all these new things, faces,
voices, ideas, are all to be read in some long and most charming letters
to Ireland, which also contain the account of a most eventful crisis
which this Paris journey brought about. The letter is dated March 1803,
and it concludes as follows:--

Here, my dear aunt, I was interrupted in a manner that will
surprise you as mu