At a later day we saw these things rather differently.  The electric intoxication over, which book or being gives but once to the same person, its elements were viewed with some distrust.  Passing from ideal to real life, as all pass, who live on, we shook our heads over the books, sighed, ceased to read them.  Grown mothers ourselves, we quietly removed them as far as possible from the young hands about us, and would rather have deprived them of the noble French language altogether than have allowed it to bring them such lessons as Jacques and Valentine.  Yet we retain the old love for her; the world of literature still seems brighter for her footsteps; and should we live to learn her death, tears must follow it, and the sense of void left by the loss of a true friend, noble and loyal-hearted, if mistaken.  With this confession of sympathy with the woman, we begin the critical consideration of the memoirs of herself she has given to the world.

These memoirs begin at the earliest possible period, including the lives of her parents and grandparents.  The latter were illustrious on one side, obscure on the other.  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.  She was chaste, benevolent, and sincere.  Her mother had been a singer of merit and celebrity, and she, the daughter, had both inherited her musical talent, and had received one of those thorough musical educations which alone make the possession of the art a pleasure and resource.  It must often occur to those who hear our young ladies sing and play, that the accomplishment is little valued by them, save as an outward social adornment.