“In the meantime, withdrawing from the interest she had excited, my mother retired almost in the precincts of the university, to be near her children, and superintend their education. This was the most quiet and distant quarter of Paris, and farthest from the bustle of the great and fashionable world. On the style in which we lived, I will only observe, that we saw no company, English nor French; and that my mother, attending exclusively to the education of her daughter, and to the superintendence of her two boys, who dwelt in the college beneath her eyes, was under the protection of that body as much as if she had been a member of it. Such was the esteem, confidence and, I would almost say, veneration with which she inspired its director and professors, that contrary to the severe regulations of French discipline, they trusted us entirely to her care. Indeed, we were all so young and so helpless, that we were general favourites, and the whole of our little family seemed adopted by the establishment. “It was nearly a year from my father’s fate; our permanent provision was yet unsettled, and our slender means could not last many months longer; when my mother, reading some old papers in her solitude, fell on a beautiful speech pronounced some months before in the council of five hundred, by Lucien Buonaparte. He proposed to simplify the forms of paying the pensions of the widows and children of military and naval officers; he represented in the most noble and feeling terms the hardship of high-spirited females and mothers of families, whose claims were clear and undoubted, obliged, in the affliction and desolation of their hearts, to solicit and go through numberless delays in the public offices. He also proposed to augment these pensions, which were too small. The sons of warriors killed on the field of battle ceased to receive them when they reached their fourteenth year; he proposed to extend this period to the age when they might, in their turn, enter the service.