FORE:In fact she had given her whole heart to her work. She thought and dreamed of nothing but painting, her career as an artist was her life, and her affection for her mother, her brother, and her friends sufficed for her domestic happiness; she wanted neither love intrigues nor even marriage to disturb the state of things she found so entirely satisfactory.
FORE:Many such undoubtedly there were; the laws [9] were terribly oppressive, the privileges of the favoured classes outrageously unjust; while as for public opinion, Barbier himself remarks that the public is a fool, and must always be unworthy of the consideration of any man.
FORE:
THREE:With the fall of the Empire departed her pension and all assistance from the Government.
THREE:From this time began her brilliant career. Essentially a woman of the world, delighting in society and amusement, though always praising the pleasures of solitude and retirement, she entered the household of the Duchesse dOrlans, wife of the infamous Philippe-galit, and while constantly declaiming against ambition managed to get all her relations lucrative posts at the Palais Royal, and married one if not both her daughters to rich men of rank with notoriously bad reputations.The abolition of lettres de cachet, liberty of the press, the strict administration of justice, the equalisation of taxation, the abolition of the oppressive privileges of the nobles; all these and others of the kind were hailed with acclamations by the generous, enthusiastic young nobles who imagined that they could regenerate and elevate to their lofty ideals the fierce, ignorant, unruly populace who were thirsting, not for reform and good government, but for plunder and bloodshed.
