Poor woman, she had enough to try her flexible will. Her husband’s elder brother, who, according to the ancient _régime_, was regarded as the head and guide of the family, was not disposed to give up his rights. He was unmarried, and particularly fond of interfering in the domestic regulations of the family whose future prospects somewhat depended on him, particularly those of Alphonse, who was to perpetuate the name. Another brother, the Abbé de Lamartine, lived further off, and was, of course, less tempted to interfere, but seems to have given his voice on extraordinary occasions. And then there were two unmarried aunts whom Madame de Lamartine seems to have been attached to, and whom in her charity she calls saints, but very trying saints they were with their strictures on her dainty ways, her careful dress, and her indulgence to her children. To do them justice, however, they all seem to have been sincerely anxious for the prosperity of the family. Madame de Lamartine brought up one son and five daughters, concerning whom she gives many interesting details in her journal. The daughters appear to have been lovely in person and character. Their brother has given a delightful description of them in his _Nouvelles Confidences_, which is confirmed by his mother’s journal. But M. de Lamartine makes a very strange mistake in saying his mother derived her notions of educating her children from the works of Rousseau (particularly from _Emile_) and St. Pierre, whom he calls “the favorite philosophers of women because the philosophers of feeling,” and “whose works,” he says, “she had read and admired.” Some of Madame de Lamartine’s earliest recollections were certainly of Gibbon, D’Alembert, Rousseau, and others of the same stamp who frequented the society of Madame des Roys. She even remembered seeing Voltaire when but seven years of age, and “his attitude, his costume, his cane, his gestures, and his words remained imprinted on my memory as the foot of some antediluvian monster on the rocks of our mountains.” But she certainly did not esteem these men or imbibe any of their opinions, and so far from having “_conservé une tendre admiration pour ce grand homme_,” Jean Jacques Rousseau, as her son declares, she regarded him with a certain horror, and his genius as allied to lunacy. In the first place, Madame de Lamartine seems to have been very scrupulous about reading dangerous books. In her journal of the year 1801, she makes a resolution to deny herself all useless reading for her children’s sake, and declares frivolous books “one of the most dangerous pleasures in the world.”