surgery, in the latter of which he attained considerable skill. In the
many subsequent years of his country life, he made these accomplishments
very useful to the village folk. No stress of weather or
unseasonableness of hours could detain him from attending the sick, when
summoned; but being obliged, as George says, to be ridiculous as well as
sublime in all things, he was wont to beat his patients when they were
bold enough to offer him money for their cure, and even made missile
weapons of the poultry and game which they brought him in acknowledgment
of his services, assailing them with blows and harder words, till they
fled, amused or angry. Maurice, his first pupil, was a delicate and
indolent child, and showed little robustness of character till his early
manhood, when the necessity of a career forced him into the ranks of the
great army.

The first threatenings of the Revolution found in Madame Dupin an
unalarmed observer. As a disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau, she could
not but detest the abuses of the Court; she shared, too, the general
personal alienation of the aristocracy from the _German woman_, as they
called Marie Antoinette. She admired, in turn, the probity of Necker and
the genius of Mirabeau; but the current of disorder finally found its
way to her, and swept away her household peace among the innumerable
wrecks that marked its passage. Implicated as the depository of some
papers supposed to be of treasonable character, she was arrested and
imprisoned in Paris, her son and Deschartres being officially separated
from her and detained at Passy. The imprisonment lasted some months, and
its tedium was beguiled by the most fervent love-letters between the boy
of sixteen and his mother. The sorrow of this separation, George says,
metamorphosed the sickly, spoiled child into a fervent and resolute
youth, whose subsequent career was full of courage and self-denial. Of
the Revolution she writes:--