Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/177

Rh and soon succumbed to grief. Another inmate, arrested not as an Englishwoman but as the widow of an aristocrat, was the Marquise de Châtellux. Mary Bridget Josephine Charlotte Plunket was lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Orleans, the wife of Egalité. Her father, Thomas Plunket, a kinsman of Lord Dunsany, was an Austrian field-marshal, had distinguished himself in the Seven Years' War, and had died governor of Antwerp in 1770. Mary, born at Louvain in 1759, was educated at the Austin convent, her future prison. A husband was found for her by a singular stratagem. The Marquis de Châtellux, a member of the Academy, and the first adult Frenchman who underwent inoculation, had published an account of his travels in America. It was contrived that he should be sent to Spa, and should steal unawares on Miss Plunket while absorbed in his book. He fell in love with her on the spot, and marriage speedily followed; the bridegroom was fifty-three, the bride twenty-three. Washington sent him a bantering letter of congratulation—"Married, my dear Marquis? You, too, caught! I have a great mind to laugh." Captain Swinburne, who saw the happy pair in 1787—by a slip of the pen he says Carondelet instead of Châtellux—writes: "He is the most passionate lover ever seen, and cannot bear to be absent from her for a moment, and even sits by her at table." Madame de Genlis was jealous