Mémoires De Mme La Comtesse De Genlis

Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis was the most scandalous woman in 18th-century France, and she knew it. In these memoirs, published in 1824-1825, she recounts her improbable life: a marriage that opened the doors of the Court, a dangerous affair with the Duke of Orléans, and her unprecedented appointment as governess to his children a role traditionally reserved for men, and one that made her the target of both royalist contempt and revolutionary suspicion. Her salon on the Rue de Bellechasse hosted Voltaire, Rousseau, Madame Du Barry, Talleyrand, and nearly every other luminary of the age. When the Revolution came, she fled; when she returned five years later, the world she knew had been obliterated. These memoirs are not confessional Genlis reveals remarkably little of her intimate life but they offer something rarer: a shrewd, unsentimental portrait of the Ancien Régime from a woman who helped run it, watched it burn, and survived to tell the tale.