She tells us that by her paternal
grandmother she was allied to the kings of France, and by her maternal
grandfather to the lowest of the people. The grandmother in question
was the natural daughter of the famous Marechal de Saxe, recognized and
educated, but finally left with slender resources, and married to M.
Dupin de Francueil, an accomplished person of good family and fortune,
greatly her senior. To him she bore one child, a son named Maurice,
after the great soldier. As might have been expected, her widowhood was
early and long, for her aged partner soon dropped from her side, beloved
and regretted. George tells us that her grandmother was wont to insist
that an old man can be more agreeable in the marital relation than a
young one, and that M. Dupin de Francueil, elegant, accomplished,
and devoted to her happiness, had in his life left nothing for her
imagination to desire or her heart to regret.
As this lady is one of the heroines of the "Histoire de ma Vie," we
cannot do it justice without lingering a little over her portraiture.
She is described as tall, fair, and of a Saxon type of beauty. Her
manners would seem to have been _de haute ecole_, and her culture was
on a large and noble scale. Austere in her morals, her faith was the
deistic philosophy of the ante-revolutionary period; but, like other
people of noble mind, instead of making doubt a pretext for license, she
brought up virtue to justify the latitude of her creed, that the solid
results of conscience should entitle her to the free interpretation of
doctrine.
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