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circumstances, he continued to permit his house to remain decorated by the forbidden emblems of the fleur-de-lis? It appeared, however, that this topic was no more happily chosen than the last.

"Because it would be cowardly to take them down," he returned roughly.

Conversation with a man in the temper in which the Duke then found himself is not easy to carry on, and poor Madame de Genlis adds that, later on, she found M. de Sillery no more ready than the Duke to accept the good advice she was prepared, with a fine impartiality, to administer to him.

All things considered, she did not feel so much regret, one may imagine, at her impending banishment from Paris as she might otherwise have done. At any rate, she made no further delay in obeying the Duke's orders; and the following morning-the dinner to which Lord Edward had been invited having taken place in the meantime-the travellers set out on their journey to Flanders. The Duke's gloom, it is recorded, was more profound than ever as he took leave of his daughter; and Mademoiselle, who seems to have been addicted to weeping, was once more in tears.

One member, however, of the party was, we are justified in concluding, no victim to the general dejection; since at the first stage of the journey Lord Edward FitzGerald joined the travellers, and accompanied them on their way to Tournay.

The sequel may be given in Madame de Genlis's

own language—the language of the woman who, at a later date, had her portrait taken with a copy of the Gospels conspicuously introduced upon a table at her side, that volume having furnished, as she is careful to explain, the basis and foundation for all her own literary productions.

"We arrived at Tournay," she relates, "during the first days of December of this same year, 1792. Three weeks later I had the happiness of marrying my adopted daughter, the angelical Pamela, to Lord Edward FitzGerald. In the midst of so many misfortunes and injustices, Heaven desired to recompense, by this happy event, the best action of my life-that of having protected helpless innocence, of having brought up and adopted the incomparable child thrown by Providence into my arms; and finally of having developed her intelligence, her reason, and the virtues which render her to-day a pattern wife and mother of her age."

Thus Madame de Genlis upon the subject of her own good deeds and the success with which they had been attended. Whether the direct interposition of Heaven in the matter of the marriage was equally patent to Lord Edward's relations may, it is true, be questioned. One may permit oneself a doubt whether, by birth, training, or possibly disposition, Madame de Genlis's adopted daughter would have been precisely the wife that the Duchess of Leinster would have desired to see bestowed upon her son. But, however that may be, there is no evidence that,

during the short term, five years and a half, of their married life, Lord Edward saw cause to repent of the hazardous experiment upon which he had embarked with such perilous haste. Gentle, affectionate, and, above all things, loyal in every relationship of life,

he was not likely to prove less so towards the girl who-like a child caught and carried along in a funeral procession-had been made his wife; and if it is probable that he found in her a companion rather for the sunny hours of life than a comrade in the darker paths he was destined later on to tread, no word of complaint remains to record the fact.

Another change, besides that effected by marriage, had taken place, by this time, in Lord Edward's existence, present and future. When he had arrived in Paris, only a few weeks earlier, he had been, so far as domestic ties were concerned, a free man. He had also held a commission in the British army. When he returned to England, not only was he in possession of a wife, but his name had been struck off the list of English officers. On the ostensible grounds of a subscription to the fund raised to enable the French to carry on the war against their invaders, but more probably owing to owing to the publicity given to those proceedings in Paris of which mention. has been made, Lord Edward had been cashiered. On the very day that his marriage was taking place at Tournay, Charles James Fox was lifting his voice in the House of Commons in protest against the action which had been thus taken in depriving

his cousin, as well as two other officers of similar opinions, of their commissions; and was challenging the Government to show just cause for the severity displayed towards these men, of one of whom, being his own near relation, he would say, from personal knowledge, "that the service did not possess a more zealous, meritorious, and promising member.'

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The remonstrance was naturally futile. Lord Edward remained-as he himself had foreseen might be the case-scratched out of the army.

CHAPTER X

1792-1793

Pamela and Lord Edward's Family-Her Portrait-Effect
upon Lord Edward of Cashierment-Catholic Convention
-Scene in Parliament-Catholic Relief Bill-Lawlessness
in the Country-Lord Edward's Isolation.

M

ADAME DE GENLIS has distinctly stated

in her account of the marriage that she would by no means have permitted the angelical Pamela—an angel, by the way, cast in very terrestrial mould-to enter the FitzGerald family without the consent of the Duchess of Leinster, giving it to be understood that Lord Edward had gone to England to obtain that consent, and that it was not until his return, successful, that the wedding took place.

Madame de Genlis should be a good authority, but there are, nevertheless, grounds for believing it at least possible that the Duchess's sanction to the arrangement was somewhat belated; and that, like a wise woman, and a mother who wished to retain her son, she had set herself after the event to make the best of the inevitable. Whether her consent was given before or after, it is possible that the recollection of her own second marriage, in which there must have

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