Franklin and the American republicans; Gibbon and the orators of the English opposition, Grimm and the German philosophers, Diderot, Sieyes, Sillery, Laclos, Suard, Florian, Raynal, La Harpe, and all the thinkers or writers who anticipated the new mind, met there with celebrated artists and _savans_.

Voltaire himself, proscribed from Versailles by the human respect of a court, which admired his genius, had arrived thither on his last journey.

The prince presented to him his children, one of whom reigns to-day over France.

The dying philosopher blessed them, as he did those of Franklin, in the name of reason and liberty.
V.
If the prince himself had not a love of literature and a highly refined mind, he had sufficiently cultivated his mind to appreciate perfectly the pleasures of the understanding; but the revolutionary feeling instinctively counselled him to surround himself with all the strength that might one day serve liberty.

Early tired of the beauty and virtue of the Duchesse d'Orleans, he had conceived for a lovely, witty, insinuating woman a sentiment which did not enchain the caprices of his heart, but which controlled his inconsistency and directed his mind.
This woman, then seducing and since celebrated, was the Comtesse de Sillery-Genlis, daughter of the Marquis Ducret de Saint Aubin, a gentleman of Charolais, without fortune.