Faults of breeding were quite as offensive to this _grande dame_ as faults of temper. The fear of her pitiless glance filled her daughters with timidity, and bred in them a _mauvaise honte_, which in its turn aroused her deadliest ire. Only a week before her wedding-day Madame de Rochefoucauld was sent ignominiously to dine at a side table, as a penance for the awkwardness of her curtsy; while even her fast-growing beauty became but a fresh source of misfortune. The dressing of her magnificent hair occupied two long hours every day, and she retained all her life a most distinct and painful recollection of her sufferings at the hands of her _coiffeuse_. To turn from the Marquise de Montmirail to Madame Quinet is to see the picture intensified. More beautiful, more stately, more unswerving still, her faith in discipline was unbounded, and her practice in no wise inconsistent with her belief. It was actually one of the institutions of her married life that a _garde de ville_ should pay a domiciliary visit twice a week to chastise the three children. If by chance they had not been naughty, then the punishment might be referred to the account of future transgressions,--an arrangement which, while it insured justice to the culprits, can hardly have afforded them much encouragement to amend. Her son Jerome, who ran away when a mere boy to enroll with the volunteers of ’92, reproduced in later years, for the benefit of his own household, many of his mother’s most striking characteristics. He was the father of Edgar Quinet, the poet, a child whose precocious abilities seem never to have awakened within him either parental affection or parental pride. Silent, austere, repellent, he offered no caresses, and was obeyed with timid submission. “The gaze of his large blue eyes,” says Dowden, “imposed restraint with silent authority. His mockery, the play of an intellect unsympathetic by resolve and upon principle, was freezing to a child; and the most distinct consciousness which his presence produced upon the boy was the assurance that he, Edgar, was infallibly about to do something which would cause displeasure.” That this was a common attitude with parents in the old _régime_ may be inferred from Châteaubriand’s statement that he and his sister, transformed into statues by their father’s presence, recovered their life only when he left the room; and by the assertion of Mirabeau that even while at school, two hundred leagues away from _his_ father, “the mere thought of him made me dread every youthful amusement which could be followed by the slightest unfavorable result.”