But such was not to be the destiny of her whose life at this moment seemed to beam with prospects of happiness which it would have been cruel to allow her to exchange for the gloom of a convent, though, even before she arrived at womanhood, the most austere seclusion of such an abode would have seemed a welcome asylum from dangers yet undreamed of.  Her destiny was indeed to be one of trials and afflictions even to the end; trials very different in their kind from those which the gates of the Carmelite sisterhood would have opened to her.  But her mother’s early lessons of humility and piety, and still more her mother’s virtuous and heroic example, never ceased to bear their fruit in their influence on her character, amidst all the vicissitudes of fortune.  The unhappy daughter,[5] as she was styled by the faithful and eloquent champion of her race, lived to win the respect even of its enemies,[6] supplying, at more than one critical moment, a courage and decision of which her male relatives were destitute; and, in the second and final ruin of her house, her fortitude and resignation still commanded the loyal adherence of a large party among her countrymen, and the esteem of foreign statesmen, who gladly recognized in her no small portion of the nobility of her female ancestors.

In the spring of 1782 the attention of the Parisians was occupied for a while by the arrival of two visitors from a nation which as yet had sent forth but few of its sons to mingle in society with those of other countries.  The Grand Duke of Russia, who had indeed been its rightful emperor ever since the murder of his father twenty years before, but who had been compelled to postpone his claims to those of his ambitious and unscrupulous mother, Catherine II., had conceived a desire so far to imitate the example of his great ancestor, the founder of the Russian empire, Peter the Great, as to make a personal investigation of the manners of other people besides his own.  To use the language in which the empress communicated to Louis XVI. her son’s wish to pay him a visit, he sought, in the first instance, “to take lessons in courtesy and nobility from the most elegant court in the world.”  And as Louis had responded with a cordial invitation to Versailles, at the end of May he, with his grand duchess, a princess of Wuertemberg, arrived at the palace.

Paul had not as yet given any indications of the brutal and ferocious disposition which distinguished him in his later years, till it gradually developed into a savage insanity which neither his nobles nor even his sons could endure.  He appeared rather a young man of frank and open temper, somewhat more unguarded in his language, especially concerning his own affairs and position, than was quite prudent or becoming; but kind in intention, sometimes even courteous in manner, shrewd in discerning what things and what persons were most worthy of his notice, and showing no deficiency of judgment in the observations which he made upon