The Empress Elizabeth, whose own life was a constant succession of love intrigues, disapproved nevertheless of this open and public scandal, particularly when her nephew was reported to be about to divorce his wife in order to marry his mistress.
ONE:Society in London she found triste after the splendour of St. Petersburg and the brilliant gaiety of Paris and Vienna, declaring that what struck her most was the want of conversation, and that a favourite form of social entertainment was what was called a rout, at which no sort of amusement or real social intercourse was offered or expected, the function merely consisting of an enormous crowd of people walking up and down the rooms, the men generally separate from the women.
In some cases it was possible to recover part, though often only a fragment of their possessions; in other cases not: it depended to a great extent what or who the forfeited estates belonged to. Sometimes, as in the case of the Duchess dAyen, people who had not emigrated, were allowed, even if they were murdered, to leave their estates to their families; but the whole state of things seemed an inextricable confusion impossible to explain; especially in a work of this kind.Barbier, a lawyer and man of the world, whose journal of eight volumes gives a vivid impression of the life of that time, after remarking that the sentence was a very lenient one, [6] that the chateau was not so large as that of many a fermier gnral, and that the building thereof gave employment to many poor people, goes on to say, As for shame, ... if it is because the King has a mistress, why who has not? except M. le duc dOrlans. [7]... The Comte de Clermont, Abb de Saint-Germain-des-Prs, openly keeps Mlle. le Duc, who was an opera dancer; she spends three-quarters of the year at Berny, the Abbs country house, where she does the honours. She has a fine house in the rue de Richelieu, where the Prince often spends a week. The fathers of the abbey who have business with him go to him there in the morning, for he does not lodge in the palace of the abbey. This goes on in sight of every one, and nobody says a word about it.A royalist, an emigr, a Prince; but the only man she never ceased to love, and of whom she said, He was her true husband.