In the intervals of his necessary occupations he studied medicine and surgery, in the latter of which he attained considerable skill.  In the many subsequent years of his country life, he made these accomplishments very useful to the village folk.  No stress of weather or unseasonableness of hours could detain him from attending the sick, when summoned; but being obliged, as George says, to be ridiculous as well as sublime in all things, he was wont to beat his patients when they were bold enough to offer him money for their cure, and even made missile weapons of the poultry and game which they brought him in acknowledgment of his services, assailing them with blows and harder words, till they fled, amused or angry.  Maurice, his first pupil, was a delicate and indolent child, and showed little robustness of character till his early manhood, when the necessity of a career forced him into the ranks of the great army.

The first threatenings of the Revolution found in Madame Dupin an unalarmed observer.  As a disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau, she could not but detest the abuses of the Court; she shared, too, the general personal alienation of the aristocracy from the German woman, as they called Marie Antoinette.  She admired, in turn, the probity of Necker and the genius of Mirabeau; but the current of disorder finally found its way to her, and swept away her household peace among the innumerable wrecks that marked its passage.  Implicated as the depository of some papers supposed to be of treasonable character, she was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, her son and Deschartres being officially separated from her and detained at Passy.  The imprisonment lasted some months, and its tedium was beguiled by the most fervent love-letters between the boy of sixteen and his mother.  The sorrow of this separation, George says, metamorphosed the sickly, spoiled child into a fervent and resolute youth, whose subsequent career was full of courage and self-denial.  Of the Revolution she writes:—­

“In my eyes, it is one of the phases of evangelical life:  a tumultuous, bloody life, terrible at certain moments, full of convulsions, of delirium, and of sobbing.  It is the violent contest of the principle of equality preached by Jesus, and passing, now like a radiant light, now like a burning torch, from hand to hand, to our own days, against the old pagan world, which is not destroyed, which will not be for a long time yet, in spite of the mission of Christ, and so many other divine missions, in spite of so many stakes, scaffolds, and martyrs.  What is there, then, to astonish us in the vertigo which seized all minds at the period of the inextricable melee into which France precipitated herself in ’93?  When everything went by retaliation, when every one became, by deed or intention, victim and executioner in turn, and when between the oppression endured and the oppression exercised there was no time for reflection or liberty of choice, how could passion have abstracted itself in action, or impartiality have dictated quiet judgments?  Passionate souls were judged by others as passionate, and the human race cried out as in the time of the ancient Hussites,—­’This is a time of mourning, of zeal, and of fury.’”