ÉTIENNETTE, or STEPHANIE FÉLICITÉ DE CREST DE ST AUBIN, COMTESSE DE, a voluminous French writer, was born in 1746, of a noble but impoverished family, at the château of Champeyry, near Autun. At the early age of fifteen she married the Comte de Genlis, who had been attracted to her as much by her wit and skill in music as by her beauty. A few years later the marriage of her aunt, the Comtesse de Montesson, with the Duke of Orléans, opened up to her the best society of Paris—a privilege which she turned to good account in her works. She was afterwards made governess to the duke's children, one of whom, Louis Philippe, finally succeeded to the throne of France. The better to carry out her theory of education, she wrote several works for the use of her royal pupils, such as the Théâtre à l'usage des jeunes personnes, Les Annales de la Vertu, Les veillées du Château, and several others. Some of these works were in a high degree useful and popular, and earned large sums of money for their author. When the French Revolution broke out, Madame de Genlis, though at first well disposed to the movement, was obliged to emigrate. Visiting successively Switzerland, Belgium, England, and Germany, and supporting herself by writing and painting, she settled in Hamburg, where she wrote her novel entitled Les Chevaliers des Cygnes, a story of the court of Charlemagne, ill-conceived, ill-executed, and, to judge from its results, ill-intentioned. This work gave a sort of colour to the slanderous aspersions of the royalist émigrés, who were exasperated at her connection with some of the extreme revolutionists. She felt her position so uncomfortable that she attempted to justify herself in a pamphlet entitled Précis de la conduite de Madame de Genlis. A clue to her real political opinions is only to be got from her actions, which at this time were decided enough, especially her marrying her adopted daughter, Pamela, to the unfortunate Lord Edward Fitzgerald, whose political creed was destined to bring him to an untimely and ignominious death. After the 18th Brumaire she applied to the first consul for leave to return home; and demeaned herself by adulations so slavish as to be only surpassed in meanness by her subsequent retraction of them. Besides the pensions and privileges which she procured from Napoleon, she realized large sums of money by hack-work for booksellers; but her utmost efforts failed to procure her admittance into the highest ranks of French literary society. She wrote a little for the Biographie Universelle, and out of a number of rejected articles concocted a book which she published under the title of De l'influence des Femmes sur la littérature. This work is distinguished by a mean spirit of detraction, envy, and spitefulness towards the leading French authoresses of that day, such as Madame de Staël, Madame Cottin, and others. About this time also she sadly foiled herself in a literary contest with Ginguén and some of the principal contributors to the Biographie Universelle. Indeed there was hardly a month of her literary career in which she was not engaged in one squabble or another, not seldom of a nature very discreditable to her; witness her quarrel with the publisher Roret. Of her later works, that which made the most noise in its day was her Diners du Baron d'Holbach, in which she set forth with a good deal of cleverness the prejudices, the intolerance, the fanaticism, and the eccentricities of the philosophers of the last century. This work, as was natural, was severely censured by the free-thinking party in France; but the author's replies to their attacks were marked by a bitterness and malignity to which they could offer nothing parallel. Madame de Genlis attained the age of eighty-four, and died Dec. 31, 1830. Before her death she had the satisfaction of seeing her quondam pupil Louis Philippe seated on the throne of France.

To give a list of the separate works of Madame de Genlis, eighty in all, is manifestly impossible within our limits. They comprise prose and poetical compositions on a vast variety of subjects, and of every grade of merit. The swiftness with which they were written, their diffuseness, and their somewhat fugitive and transitory interest, forbid us to look in them for thought of perennial value or literary art of the highest or indeed of a high order. Posterity seems to have confirmed the verdict of Palissot, who declared that Madame de Genlis' fame would rest solely on her Théâtre d'Éducation. This judgment may seem rather harsh; but it is true that that work is the only one which still continues to stand the test of time, if we except perhaps some of the Contes Moraux, La Duchesse de La Vallière, and Made-mousette de Clermont. Madame de Genlis owed much of her literary success to her social tact. She turned her position in the Orléans family to such good account as to make it react on her literary standing, and gain for her an eminence to which she was by no means justly entitled. Her appearance was good, and her manners in a high degree attractive and fascinating. To these qualities, and her inordinate ambition, she owed her extraordinary success in life, which she never allowed a regard for consistency or honour to interfere with. No woman of her day had a finer knack of disentangling herself from humble friends who were no longer likely to be useful, or of more delicately making herself necessary to those who stood on the higher grades of the social ladder, whose heights it was her chief ambition to climb. After she fairly reached the top, she is not known to have actively assisted or befriended any but her own nearest relations. (For a complete list of Madame de Genlis' works see supplement to the Biographie Universelle, vol. lxv.)