Once, while hovering near death, Georgiana dreamed that she had become a dandelion.
The flower represented love that could not stay. For someone who wanted stability, it was a very unlucky flower.
Yet it also represented making peace with wherever one found oneself. Its seeds took root wherever the wind carried them, no matter how far from their mother they landed.
She had thought she liked mint and Christmas cactus best, never expecting there to be Skeleton Flower too, a flower that represented family affection.
When a person was bound to a patch of land, they lost their freedom like grass that had taken root. The feeling of wandering for too long was not pleasant either.
A hundred thousand people competing for a thousand positions was far fiercer than nobles scrambling to pick up Louis XV's handkerchief, especially when the person in power was a foreigner in the eyes of the French nobility.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality that in the state of nature, the strong oppressed the weak. Some used violence to subdue others, seized the caves others used as homes, and stole their game and fruit. Whoever disturbed my peace, I would surely plunge him into endless trouble, trouble greater than what he sought to avoid and greater than what he imposed upon me. Besides, he would always let down his guard eventually. I only needed to run twenty steps, and I would vanish into the forest. My bonds would be broken, and he would never see me again.
Georgiana stood by the window, watching the forest sink into darkness. Should she disappear into the woods while she still could?
She was now in the Paris Agricultural Association's villa, which she intended to use as a temporary headquarters.
The reason Napoleon abolished mercenaries