of the Marchioness, whom she accuses of supplanting her in the favour of the Duchess of Orleans. Possibly she opened the Duchess's eyes to the relations between Egalité and his children's governess. The bride was in twelve months a widow, but gave birth to a son, Alfred, who was petted by the Duchess, his godmother. Gouverneur Morris, the American ambassador, was very friendly with Madame de Châtellux, who introduced him to the Duchess, and whom he describes as "an amiable woman, not the less lovely for the tears she sheds to her husband's memory." Morris was so fond of discussing financial and political programmes that Madame de Châtellux used to tell him that her patriotic gift—patriotic gifts were then in vogue—would be to present him to Louis XVI. as one of his ministers.[1] Her English coachman Archley was among the captors of the Bastille, yet she was regarded as one of the instigators of the departure of the King's aunts, who, poor ladies, thus escaped revolutionary horrors. Perhaps on this account she was a prisoner from November 1793 to November 1794 at the Austin nunnery, where she had been at school just twenty years before.
Mirabeau's mother was also at the Austin convent. The Marquis de Mirabeau, the self-styled "friend of man," but not the friend of his own household, describes his life with her as "twenty years of
- ↑ Scribner's Magazine, January 1887.
