The things we do!

She hesitates at nothing,
like other poets of her nation: not profoundly learned, she invents where
she has not acquired: mingles together religion and the opera; and
performs Parisian pas-de-ballet before the gates of monasteries and the
cells of anchorites. She describes, as if she had herself witnessed the
catastrophe, the passage of the Red Sea: and, as if there were no doubt
of the transaction, an unhappy love-affair between Pharaoh's eldest son
and Moses's daughter. At Cairo, apropos of Joseph's granaries, she enters
into a furious tirade against Putiphar, whom she paints as an old savage,
suspicious and a tyrant. They generally have a copy of the Footprints of
the Gazelles at the Circulating Library at Baden, as Madame d'Ivry
constantly visits that watering-place. M. le Duc was not pleased with the
book, which was published entirely without his concurrence, and which he
described as one of the ten thousand follies of Madame la Duchesse.
This nobleman was five-and-forty years older than his duchess.


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