Instead of making her way to some quiet sunny spot on the shores of the Mediterranean, the lady whose health had completely broken down under the strain of town life hastened to Paris and there revived. In this intellectual city she is suddenly struck by her own ignorance, acquires a taste for reading, or rather for writers, and procures introductions to the great authors of the day--Barthélémy, the author of _Le jeune Anarcharse_, at whose reception into the Academy she was present, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, for whose _Paul et Virginie_ she had always had the greatest admiration. She makes a cult of Saint-Pierre and nature, witnesses the fall of the Bastille, but at the same time runs up an account of some 20,000 francs at her milliner's. When she is in the south of France, a young officer, M. de Frègeville, falls in love with her. Less inexperienced now than she had been in Copenhagen, she yields, after a struggle, to his persuasions. He induces her to spend another winter in France, in spite of a promise given to her husband, and to return to Paris instead of to Copenhagen in the following year (1791). After Louis XVI's unsuccessful attempt at flight, Paris was no longer a safe place of residence for Madame de Krüdener. She made her escape from France with M. de Frègeville, who was disguised as her lackey, spent some weeks at Brussels, and then travelled by way of Cassel and Hanover to Hamburg, still accompanied and protected by her lover in his character of lackey. At Hamburg she was met by her husband, but as she even there refused to part from her favourite servant, there was a violent scene. Krüdener advised her to go for a time to her mother at Riga, and thither too she was accompanied by the disguised French officer. Her mother received her most cordially. In 1792, when she and her mother went to St. Petersburg to see her dying father, she again met her husband, who had come there to raise the money he required to procure a divorce. She threw herself at his feet, was forgiven, and made promises which she did not keep. For the next few years she wandered about Europe, separated from her husband and from De Frègeville, but living the life of the dissolute, gay lady of the last decade of the eighteenth century. Even in his most private letters of this year her husband never mentions her name.