A Keeper of Royal Secrets —— Being the Private and Political Life of Madame De Genlis

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ISBN: 9781331830887 出版年：2016 页码：503 Jean Harmand Forgotten Books

This volume has not had for its aim the rehabilitation of Mme. de Genlis, but it is the truth about her, and a semi-rehabilitation of her has resulted from the truth. The time was ripe for such a book (and it was not an easy book to write), for Mine, de Genlis had come to be only a name remembered only with a smile, inasmuch as it evoked the idea of the most tedious of all the tedious authors of a very tedious epoch; and, for some, the idea of a political intrigante of somewhat easy morals, who, in the witty phrase of another woman, made precepts of the virtues and a practice of the vices.To many people it would not much matter if these ideas had continued to prevail until the very name of Mme. de Genlis had been forgotten, but it does matter a little to the literary history of France that such an impression should be rectified in so far as it is incorrect.The reputation of Mme. de Genlis has suffered from two things: from her wit, which was very sardonic and which drew down on her by way of reprisals a certain number of uncomplimentary characterisations that have survived; and her Memoirs, which are so manifestly inaccurate and which leave so much untold, that - as often happens in such cases people - have been disposed to believe the worst of her. I should like to write a book such as nobody has ever written, someone said once to Rivarol. Faites voire eloge, was his reply.