oft-played

Updated: May 18, 2025

Beautiful, versatile, generous, but fastidious and exacting in her friendships, with a dash of coquetry inevitable when a woman is fascinating and French she repeated the oft-played role of a mariage de convenance at sixteen, a few brilliant years of social triumphs marred by domestic neglect and suffering, a period of enforced seclusion after the death of her unworthy husband, a brief return to the world, and an old age of mild and comfortable devotion.

Amelia Ruth Gere Mason - The Women of the French Salons