endeavoured, by her soothing sweetness, to make ours sit more easy.—She was my father's favourite, and her influence had, for some time, the power to assuage the harshness of his temper—but, by degrees, even that failed of its effect, and his mortified pride, his lost happiness, and his gloomy notions of religion, combined to increase this ferocity, and irritate his asperity, till, at length, his children, though the children of a woman he so fondly loved, seemed to afford him nothing but objects of anger and tyranny, and he was left alone to the influence of Father Ignatius, a Jesuit, whom he took into his house as the director of his conscience; and whose purpose, it seemed to be, to estrange him from his family entirely.

There is a point, beyond which, the endurance of the most patient sufferer, cannot go—Genevieve, indeed, Was not yet arrived at this point, but the Baron and I had long since passed it, and determined to break the setters, which, in their present form, we did not think even paternal authority had a right to impose. The Baron, therefore, wrote to D'Ermenonville, representing our situation, and entreating his assistance to deliver us from it.
The Marquis D'Ermenonville had, perhaps, no great affection for us; he could not be totally indifferent to the representation of the Baron; and felt, perhaps, some pleasure, in being able to thwart his father, where it seemed to be a sort of duty to act in opposition to him. For this purpose, he immediately, and by a way which we had pointed out to him, sent us a considerable supply of money, and directed us both to quit the castle in the night, and find our way to Perpignan, where his servant and horses should attend to conduct us to Paris.—He urged, not only the cruelty the Count de Bellegarde was guitly of,

in thus obliging us to waste the best of our days in a desart; but the appearance it must have to the world, that when a war was carrying on, two young men, enlisted in their country's service, submitted to be confined, like monks, in a cloister.—This remark would have been enough to have fired us with ambition and military ardor; but to the incitements of honour, he added the allurements of pleasure—and every scruple that remained (for I had still some as to leaving my father without his permission) gave way before their united influence.
I could not, however, with equal