Mme. de Serilly
READERS in general like either a happy ending or a moral. If the hero dies young they expect that his misfortune should be due to a flaw in his own character, or that he should die in a good cause, or at least that his death should be significant of something or other wider than itself. By choosing to write the life of Mme. de Serilly Miss Evans refuses all such concessions. Mme. de Serilly's first husband, a stout and well-intentioned country gentleman, all in favour of the 1789 constitution and much lilted by his tenants, was swept off to indefinite imprisonment, a farcical trial and the guillotine. She herself survived by pretending at the last minute that she was pregnant ; and after some months in the Conciergerie and the Eveche emerged to take up the reins again. She prevented the silver from being melted down, got the estate into order, saw to the children's darning and gave a few -small dinner-parties to the neighbours. In 1796 she married her former lover, Andre Chalices friend, Francois de Pange. He died of tuberculosis five months later. he started once more, took a dark appartement in Paris with her cousin Pauline de Beaumont, advised her son on the degree of familiarity to show the peasants (a mouthful or two of galette but on no account stay to dinner) and bought back some family estates. Then, in 1798, she married M. de Montesquiou, kindly, distinguished, elderly, and given to crying over sentimental novels. 'Less than three months afterwards he died of black smallpox. She caught the disease from him, and after considerable suffering died the following spring at the age of thirty-six.
Such is the story Miss Evans tells. Her book is slight—barely more than an essay—but since it is honest and obviously inspired by genuine interest it is worth reading.. I could myself have done without the title, which leaves, a thrgad of sentimentality through the narrative of a singularly unsentimental career ; life, rather than happiness, was what Mme. de Serilly grabbed at. But having entered this' caveat I commend this brief biography -both to those who have looked at Mine. de Serilly's portrait head in the Wallace Collection and her boudoir furnishings in the Victoria and Albert and to those who are interested in what happens to people and how they behave in revolu- tions. It is always useful to be reminded that there were kings before
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