e declared that should the princess express such a desire, far
from being annoyed, "she should feel flattered by it;[4]" she would, it
may be presumed, have regarded it as a convincing testimony of the
soundness of her own system of education, and of the purity of the
instruction which she had given.

But such was not to be the destiny of her whose life at this moment seemed
to beam with prospects of happiness which it would have been cruel to
allow her to exchange for the gloom of a convent, though, even before she
arrived at womanhood, the most austere seclusion of such an abode would
have seemed a welcome asylum from dangers yet undreamed of. Her destiny
was indeed to be one of trials and afflictions even to the end; trials
very different in their kind from those which the gates of the Carmelite
sisterhood would have opened to her. But her mother's early lessons of
humility and piety, and still more her mother's virtuous and heroic
example, never ceased to bear their fruit in their influence on her
character, amidst all the vicissitudes of fortune. The unhappy
daughter,[5] as she was styled by the faithful and eloquent champion of
her race, lived to win the respect even of its enemies,[6] supplying, at
more than one critical moment, a courage and decision of which her male
relatives were destitute; and, in the second and final ruin of her house,
her fortitude and resignation still commanded the loyal adherence of a
large party among her countrymen, and the esteem of foreign statesmen, who
gladly recognized in her no small portion of the nobility of her female
ancestors.

In the spring of 1782 the attention of the Parisians was occupied for a
while by the arrival of two visitors from a nation which as yet had sent
forth but few of its sons to mingle in society with those of other
countries. The Grand Duke of Russia, who had indeed been its rightful
emperor ever since the murder of his father twenty years before, but who
had been compelled to postpone his claims to those of his ambitious and
unscrupulous mother, Catherine II., had conceived a desire so far to
imitate the example of his great ancestor, the founder of the Russian
empire, Peter the Great, as to make a personal investigation of the
manners of other people besides his own. To use the language in which the
empress communicated to Louis XVI. her son's wish to pay him a visit, he
sought, in the first instance, "to take lessons in courtesy and nobility
from th