Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud (Being secret letters from a gentleman at Paris to a nobleman in London) — Volume 5 by Stewarton
page 29 of 56 (51%)
page 29 of 56 (51%)
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While the humbled remnants of one sex of the ci-devant privileged classes are thus or worse employed, many persons of the other sex have preferred domestic servitude to courtly splendour, and are chambermaids or governesses, when they might have been Maids of Honour or ladies-in-waiting. Mademoiselle de R------, daughter of Marquis de R------, was offered a place as a Maid of Honour to Princesse Murat, which she declined, but accepted at the same time the offer of being a companion of the rich Madame Moulin, whose husband is a ci-devant valet of Comte de Brienne. Her father and brother suffered for this choice and preference, which highly offended Bonaparte, who ordered them both to be transported to Guadeloupe, under pretence that the latter had said in a coffee-house that his sister would rather have been the housemaid of the wife of a ci-devant valet, than the friend of the wife of a ci-devant assassin and Septembrizer. It was only by a valuable present to Madame Bonaparte from Madame Moulin, that Mademoiselle de B----- was not included in the act of proscription against her father and brother. I am sorry to say that returned emigrants have also been arrested for frauds and debts, and even tried and convicted of crimes. But they are proportionally few, compared with those who, without support, and perhaps without hope, and from want of resignation and submission to the will of Providence, have, in despair, had recourse to the pistol or dagger, or in the River Seine buried their remembrance both of what they have been and of what they were. The suicides of the vicious capital are reckoned upon an average to amount to one hundred in the month; and for these last three years, one-tenth, at least, have been emigrants of both sexes! |
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