612 Life of Count Rumford. 



herself to the conditions which they compelled her to 

 accept. She had had to see at the court at Munich, and 

 to hold playful relations with, little " Sophy," a child of 

 the Countess Baumgarten by her father; and, seeing his 

 affection evidently divided between his two children, she 

 acceded even gracefully to the sisterly relation. Sophy 

 died in childhood ; but Sarah had her portrait, which 

 always hung in her private apartment in all her sub- 

 sequent places of abode, and it was on the wall of the 

 chamber in which she died. Another irregular con- 

 nection of the Count's resulted in the birth of an infant, 

 at his house at Auteuil, in the year of his own death. 

 This infant became a man of great excellence of char- 

 acter, and as an officer of the French army was killed 

 at Sebastopol. To a son of this officer, still living in 

 Paris, the Countess left in her will a large legacy. 



It was not strange that the Countess, while proud 

 of her father and sincerely lamenting his death, which 

 left her alone among strangers in a foreign land, 

 though by no means destitute of friends, should also 

 indulge in some critical freedom when speaking of him 

 after he was gone, not only to those who had known 

 him, but to her own intimate acquaintances in America. 

 Had she herself been of a more substantial, self-dis- 

 ciplined, and at the same time more thoroughly deli- 

 cate and refined nature, she would doubtless have had 

 over her father a gentle but a powerful influence for 

 good. The Countess thought that he would have been 

 a happier and a better man if he could have had a legal 

 relation with the excellent and lovely Countess Noga- 

 rola, whom he greatly admired, instead of an illegal 

 relation with her sister. The portraits of both these 

 ladies were also among the ornaments of Sarah's private 



