Mademoiselle Felicite des Touches became an orphan in 1793.  Her property escaped confiscation by reason of the deaths of her father and brother.  The first was killed on the 10th of August, at the threshold of the palace, among the defenders of the king, near whose person his rank as major of the guards of the gate had placed him.  Her brother, one of the body-guard, was massacred at Les Carmes.  Mademoiselle des Touches was two years old when her mother died, killed by grief, a few days after this second catastrophe.  When dying, Madame des Touches confided her daughter to her sister, a nun of Chelles.  Madame de Faucombe, the nun, prudently took the orphan to Faucombe, a good-sized estate near Nantes, belonging to Madame des Touches, and there she settled with the little girl and three sisters of her convent.  The populace of Nantes, during the last days of the Terror, tore down the chateau, seized the nuns and Mademoiselle des Touches, and threw them into prison on a false charge of receiving emissaries of Pitt and Coburg.  The 9th Thermidor released them.  Felicite’s aunt died of fear.  Two of the sisters left France, and the third confided the little girl to her nearest relation, Monsieur de Faucombe, her maternal great-uncle, who lived in Nantes.

Monsieur de Faucombe, an old man sixty years of age, had married a young woman to whom he left the management of his affairs.  He busied himself in archaeology,—­a passion, or to speak more correctly, one of those manias which enable old men to fancy themselves still living.  The education of his ward was therefore left to chance.  Little cared-for by her uncle’s wife, a young woman given over to the social pleasures of the imperial epoch, Felicite brought herself up as a boy.  She kept company with Monsieur de Faucombe in his library; where she read everything it pleased her to read.  She thus obtained a knowledge of life in theory, and had no innocence of mind, though virgin personally.  Her intellect floated on the impurities of knowledge while her heart was pure.  Her learning became extraordinary, the result of a passion for reading, sustained by a powerful memory.  At eighteen years of age she was as well-informed on all topics as a young man entering a literary career has need to be in our day.  Her prodigious reading controlled her passions far more than conventual life would have done; for there the imaginations of young girls run riot.  A brain crammed with knowledge that was neither digested nor classed governed the heart and soul of the child.  This depravity of the intellect, without action upon the chastity of the body, would have amazed philosophers and observers, had any one in Nantes even suspected the powers of Mademoiselle des Touches.