His well-known hatred against the court had naturally drawn into his acquaintance all who desired a change.  The Palais Royal was the elegant centre of a conspiracy with open doors, for the reform of government:  the philosophy of the age there encountered politics and literature:  it was the palace of opinion.  Buffon came there constantly to pass the latter evenings of his life.  Rousseau there received at a distance the only worship which his proud sensitiveness would accept even from princes.  Franklin and the American republicans; Gibbon and the orators of the English opposition, Grimm and the German philosophers, Diderot, Sieyes, Sillery, Laclos, Suard, Florian, Raynal, La Harpe, and all the thinkers or writers who anticipated the new mind, met there with celebrated artists and savans.  Voltaire himself, proscribed from Versailles by the human respect of a court, which admired his genius, had arrived thither on his last journey.  The prince presented to him his children, one of whom reigns to-day over France.  The dying philosopher blessed them, as he did those of Franklin, in the name of reason and liberty.

V.

If the prince himself had not a love of literature and a highly refined mind, he had sufficiently cultivated his mind to appreciate perfectly the pleasures of the understanding; but the revolutionary feeling instinctively counselled him to surround himself with all the strength that might one day serve liberty.  Early tired of the beauty and virtue of the Duchesse d’Orleans, he had conceived for a lovely, witty, insinuating woman a sentiment which did not enchain the caprices of his heart, but which controlled his inconsistency and directed his mind.  This woman, then seducing and since celebrated, was the Comtesse de Sillery-Genlis, daughter of the Marquis Ducret de Saint Aubin, a gentleman of Charolais, without fortune.  Her mother, who was still young and handsome, had brought her to Paris, to the house of M. de la Popeliniere, a celebrated financier, whose old age she had taken captive.  She educated her daughter for that doubtful destiny which awaits women on whom nature has lavished beauty and mind, and to whom society has refused their right position—­adventuresses in society, sometimes raised, sometimes degraded.

The first masters formed this child by all the arts of mind and hand—­her mother directed her to ambition.  The second-rate position of this mother at the house of her opulent protector, formed the child to the plasticity and adulation which her mother’s domestic condition required and illustrated.  At sixteen years of age her precocious beauty and musical talent caused her to be already sought in the salons.  Her mother produced her there in the dubious publicity between the theatre and the world.  An artiste for some, she was, with others, a well educated girl; all were attracted by her:  old men forgot their age.  Buffon called