She goes on to tell of the “delicious life” she leads at Bellechasse. She is relieved by her position from the “fag” of paying visits, but she can receive them very much at her ease. Men were received, this being a privilege of Princesses of the Blood Royal, but they had to leave at ten o’clock.... But, like Bourdalone going to preach at Saint Cyr, it is to be hoped that they took their dinner before they went, for, “to avoid useless expense, I had decided that none of my friends should dine at Bellechasse, except my husband, my brother, and my two sisters-in-law.” And these dined here but rarely. She had hardly been installed when she got permission for her mother, and her two daughters to come and live with her, and we may feel sure that she early cast about in her mind for a reasonable pretext for introducing on the scene poor little Pamela, who was being brought up like a fisherman’s child in a little village in England. In the meantime something really important and remarkable happened. The Duke came one evening to Bellechasse, and announced to Madame de Genlis that he should have to provide immediately a “gouverneur” for the two young Princes, whose manners were getting atrocious. He instanced the little Duke of Valois complaining of having to “tambourine” too long at his father’s door, and quoted a pun of the same little Prince, which was certainly not in the style of a Salon of the period. Their father came to consult Madame de Genlis on the choice of a “gouverneur.” She proposed several, and each met with an objection. M. de Schomberg would make the boys little pedants; the Chevalier de Durfort would pass on to them his own faults of over-emphasis and exaggeration; Monsieur de Thiars was too frivolous. “What about myself, then?” “Why not?” replied the Duke seriously. “His air and tone struck me greatly. I saw the possibility of something extraordinary and glorious, and I desired its realisation with all my heart.” As a matter of fact, before the Duke left the matter was settled, and Madame de Genlis had an honour and a title that no woman in France ever had before. Now the Ladies of the Palais Royal would know what was behind her retirement!