TWO:The brilliant social success, and the life, a perpetual scene of pleasure, excitement and intense interest, were chequered with all sorts of annoyances. The envy she excited by her social triumphs, the favour of the Duchess, and later, of the Duc de Chartres, displayed itself as usual in slanders, misrepresentations, and different spiteful actions; while the hostility she aroused caused her more astonishment than would have been expected in a woman possessing so much knowledge of the world, and more unhappiness than one might suspect in one so entirely self-satisfied.
TWO:Freethinkers, deists, or open atheists most of them were, delighting in blasphemous assaults and attacks, not only upon the Church and religion in general, but upon God himself; and so outrageous and scurrilous was their habitual language [12] upon such subjects that they found it necessary to disguise, by a sort of private slang known only to each other, their conversation in public places where it might be not only offensive to their hearers, but dangerous to themselves.
