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Updated: September 10, 2025
Just now it is the moments of Antony's company he counts, like a little miser. Well! that may save him perhaps from developing a certain meanness of character I have sometimes feared for him. August 1705. We returned home late this summer evening Antony Watteau, my father and sisters, young Jean-Baptiste, and myself from an excursion to Saint-Amand, in celebration of Antony's last day with us.
Napoleon was wise enough to recognize such diplomacy, and encouraged her to intrigue like an experienced diplomat. She was the most efficient aid and means to his future plans, and M. Saint-Amand says that without her he would possibly never have become emperor.
Besides her patrimonial house in the Rue Saint-Amand, she had retained the quiet house in the Faubourg Bouvreuil which still served as a refuge for the exiles sought by the police of the Directory, and as a depôt for the refractories who were sure of finding supplies there and means of rejoining the royalist army.
M. Saint-Amand says of her writings: "More reflection than vivacity, more wisdom than passion, more gravity than charm, more authority than grace, more solidity than brilliancy—such are the characteristics of a correspondence which might justify the expression, the style is the woman."
Suddenly a cheery, vigorous knock made everybody jump. "Ah! there's Monsieur André. Quick, Élise, a cup. Yaia, the little cakes." Meanwhile, Mademoiselle Henriette, the third of the Joyeuse girls, who had inherited from her mother, born Saint-Amand, a certain worldly side, in view of the crowded condition of the salons that evening, rushed to light the two candles on the piano.
The perfumed Louis XIII style, composed of elements highly prized at that time, of iris powder, musk, chive and myrtle water already designated under the name of "water of the angels," was hardly sufficient to express the cavalier graces, the rather crude tones of the period which certain sonnets of Saint-Amand have preserved for us.
The Camisards recognising this danger, retired, but not before they had burnt down the hotels of the Cheval-Blanc, the Croix-d'Or, the Grand-Louis, and the Luxembourg, as well as a great number of other houses, and the church and the presbytery of Saint-Amand. Thence the Camisards proceeded to Cayla and Vauvert, into which they entered, destroying the fortifications.
Marguerite was a rare exception in a period described by M. Saint-Amand as one in which women were Christian in certain aspects of their character and pagan in others, taking an active part in every event, ruling by wit and beauty, wisdom and courage; an age of thoughtless gaiety and morbid fanaticism, and of laughter and tears, still rough and savage, yet with an undercurrent of subtle grace and exquisite politeness; an age in which the extremes of elegance and cruelty were blended, in which the most glaring scepticism and intense superstitions were everywhere evident; an age which was religious as well as debauched and whose women were both good and evil, innocent and intriguing.
After the first stress of emotion they talk more seriously. It is certain that Mme. Joyeuse, nee de Saint-Amand, would never have consented to this marriage. Andre Maranne is not rich, still less noble; but the old accountant, luckily, has not the same ideas of grandeur that his wife possessed.
Modest, complaisant, promptly and readily rendering a favor, prudent, practical and virtuous, her one desire was to make friends, not so much for the purpose of using them, but because she realized that a person in humble circumstances cannot have too many friends. Her portrait as a widow is admirably drawn by M. Saint-Amand: "Mme. Scarron seeks esteem, not love.
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