of which was limited to two inside seats, was all they could afford. To economise space and expense, Talleyrand and the Count de Narbonne alternated the character of footman, while the ladies and the older gentlemen took it in turns to occupy the inside seats. A daughter of Dr. Burney, who had married a gentleman of the name of Phillips, lived at Norbury Park, close by. An intimacy sprang up between the neighbours, and it was here that Frances Burney, who was staying with her sister at the time, first met her future husband, M. D'Arblay.

Notwithstanding their straitened purses and the inconveniences of exile, the émigrés contrived to pass the days very pleasantly in their charming Surrey retreat. Meetings were held sometimes at the Hall, sometimes at Norbury. Madame de Staël was ever the life and soul of the party, illumining it by her brilliant conversational powers and delighting all by tragic readings from the French dramatists-which were wonderfully fine-as well as from her own works. Frances Burney, in a letter to her father, well describes this little society.

"Madame de Staël is now the head of the little French colony in this neighbourhood. Monsieur de Staël is at present suspended in his embassy, but not recalled; it is yet uncertain whether the Regent, Duke of Sudermania, will send him to Paris during the present horrible Convention, or order him home. He is now in Holland, waiting for commands. Madame de Staël, however, was unsafe in Paris, though an ambassadress, from the resentment owed her by the commune. She is a woman of the first abilities, I think, I have ever seen; she is more in the style of Mrs. Thrale than of any other celebrated character, but she has infinitely more depth, and seems even a profound politician and metaphysician. She has suffered us to hear some of her works in manuscript, which are truly wonderful for powers both of thinking and expression. She adores her father, but is alarmed at having had no news from him since he has heard of the death of the martyred Louis. Ever since her arrival she has been pressing me to spend some time with her before I return to town. She exactly resembles Mrs. Thrale in the ardour and warmth of her partialities. I find her impossible to resist. She is only a short walk from here-at Juniper Hall. There can be nothing imagined more charming, more fascinating, than this little colony; between their sufferings and their agréments they occupy us almost wholly. Monsieur de Narbonne bears the highest character for goodness, parts, sweetness of temper and ready wit. He has been much affected by the King's death, but relieved by hearing through Monsieur de Malesherbes that his master retained a regard for him to the last. Monsieur de Talleyrand insists on conveying this letter to you. He has been on a visit here, and returns again on Wednesday."

But so strong has been the reaction in England since the execution of Louis that all who are known to have been sympathisers with the Revolution, even in its earliest stages, are in bad odour. This is to be traced to those bigoted royalists whose evil influence upon the King did so much to foment the nation to insurrection. Dr. Burney writes to his daughter to tell her that he has heard Madame de Staël spoken lightly of in certain high circles, and advises her to break off the con

nection. Miss Frances writes back to say that although the Baroness is wonderfully free in her manners she feels perfectly convinced that she is a pure woman. Yet, notwithstanding, as the certain high circles (i.e., the Grundies) speak lightly of her, she would give the world to be able to decline going to a party to which she has pledged herself. She is quite convinced of her friend's innocence, quite convinced that the reports are false; but the very existence of such slanders makes her desirous of eschewing the acquaintance. How truly English! What a lovely specimen of propriety you were, Miss Frances! What a grand grim visage you must have been at forty, Madame D'Arblay!

The effect of these slanders was soon apparent in the dropping of the English visitors out of the circle of Juniper Hall. Soon afterwards Madame de Staël rejoined her father at Coppet. All Europe was at the time overwhelmed with horror at the news of the approaching murder of Marie-Antoinette, and she wrote a noble defence of the hapless queen, a passionate appeal for mercy. As well might she have appealed to wolves and tigers. Numerous refugees were hiding in Switzerland, and to all was she a true and indefatigable friend; she found for them Swedish names, and assisted them both with her influence and with her purse. The Swiss government dared shelter no French fugitive knowingly, and more than once this noble woman pleaded for hours the desperate cause of some poor fellow that the magistrates were upon the point of giving up to the Paris hyænas, and usually successfully.

Beyond the grief and horror she experienced at the sufferings of her unhappy country, the tedium of exile was intolerable to her. She was as essentially a Parisian as Dr. Johnson was a Londoner, and her exclamation that she preferred the stream in the Rue du Bac, a fourth storey in Paris, and an income of a hundred louis, to all the beauties of the Lake of Geneva, reads like an echo of the great lexicographer's praise of Fleet Street. "Were it not for the opinion of the world I would not open my window to see the Bay of Naples for the first time," she said, "but I would go five hundred leagues to talk with a man of travel whom I had never met." It sounds strange to say of a devoted disciple of Jean-Jacques and of a mind so sentimental and impassioned, that she was insensible to the beauties of nature; but so it was. Her sympathies were wholly engrossed by the living world, solitude had no charms for her; she lived only in society and in communion with kindred souls.

During her stay in Switzerland she published those early fictions which have been previously mentioned. A year later, 1796, she published her work upon the Passions, the most striking and remarkable book which had yet appeared from her pen.

Order being restored, she returns once more to her beloved Paris.

France is now ruled by the Directory. The Reign of Terror has passed away, and its creators have expiated their crimes upon the scaffold, or are expiating them in distant exile under a tropical sun. The Jacobins have been swept away into holes and corners, where they lurk, wolf-like, waiting hopefully for the hour when they may again uprear the standard of anarchy. Sansculottism, still ragged and famishing, although it is the year five of the glorious Republic, has been overawed, crushed; it has clamoured for loaves, and its republican masters have given it lead, as its monarchical masters have done before. Poor Sansculottism! When thy misery and hunger grow obstreperous that is the usual kind of food which a parental government, be it called republic or monarchy, provides for thee. Not without insurrection, grapeshot, and much blood-spilling has order been restored; more than once has Jacobinism nearly triumphed; but this time it has been opposed by no poor weak Girondists, but by an iron soldiery, that itself has trained, notably by a young officer named Napoleon Bonaparte, before whom that band of assassins is scattered like chaff before the wind. Jacobinism has an enemy sworn to extermination in the Jeunesse dorée, composed of the relatives of those who perished during the Terror, and who prowl about armed with heavy clubs to take summary vengeance upon any Jacobin who comes in their way. Notwithstanding their ruffianly employment, they dress in highly dandified costume, superfine in quality and exquisite in cut.

But who could recognise in the Paris of to-day the splendid capital of the Bourbons? Decay, ruin, disorder, are everywhere; the great houses fallen into dilapidation, their gates unhinged, trade stagnated, shops closed, a dead level of impecuniosity everywhere; a carriage passing through the streets causes every one to rush to their windows, to gaze wonderingly upon such a piece of unknown luxury.

But nevertheless there is luxury within certain doors. Barras at the Luxembourg gives receptions and petits soupers à la Régence. Barras, although he has worn the bonnet rouge, and has been an instrument of la Terreur, is of a noble and ancient family of Provence, and now that la Terreur has been swept away he affects aristocratic society. But the leader of fashion is Madame Tallien née that Thérésa Fontenai who so greatly contributed to the destruction of Robespierre. A motley society is that which gathers around her, made up of wonderfully incongruous chaotic elements. Slowly and timidly the less stiff-necked of the émigrés return to Paris, and are to be found both at Barras', and here, shoulder to shoulder with the bourgeois of the boulevards, or with some unlettered denizen of SaintAntoine, grown rich upon the plunder of suspects. There are no distinctions of rank: all are still citoyens and citoyennes, and live in a happy state of equality in their particular circles. But nevertheless

it is the fashion to scorn the manners that obtained under the Convention, to ridicule and caricature the Republicans of last year, and to affect aristocratic airs and graces.

The costume à la Carmagnole, with its black shag spencer, woollen shirt, sabots, and bonnet rouge, has long since been disdainfully cast aside, and the citoyen and citoyenne study how absurdly or how gorgeously they can dress. The ladies attire themselves in imitation of Greek statuary, to which they approach in nudity; a tunic of white cashmere, which scarcely covers their bosom and shoulders, is looped on one side to the knee by an antique cameo, and confined under the bosom by a ceinture of gold or bright metal; the arms are bare, and clasped with bracelets and armlets of gold studded with cameos. Upon the legs are worn buskins; the feet are bare, save for the Roman sandal, and the toes are encircled with rings of gold and precious stones. The hair is worn in loose curls, gathered in a snood, and secured by an antique fillet, and is often of a colour different to the complexion—a fashion affected by the Roman ladies. When they go abroad they drape around them shawls of white or scarlet cashmere, and veils of transparent gauze lightly cloud their faces. Classicism is still the rage, not Spartan, as under Robespierre, but rather Corinthian. The boudoirs are furnished in Pompeian style beds, couches, urns, lamps, bronzes-all are Roman.

The men sometimes don the Roman tunic and toga. When the Directory publicly received Bonaparte after the Peace of Campo Formio, to hear him recite the story of his achievements, they wore the costume of Roman Senators. But the male dress most in vogue is that of the Incroyables, which is still familiar to us in the pictures of our grandfathers. The jaws and chin buried in a huge cravat, the head half concealed by an enormous coat collar, a short waistcoat, nankeen breeches, with bunches of ribbons at the knees, silk stockings and shoes, or boots with buff tops; the hair plaited or dressed in queues, rings in the ears, a bunch of seals and trinkets hanging to the knee, and a twisted knotted cane in the hand-such was the Incroyable, who affected the most dandified airs and never pronounced the letter R.

The morality of such a society may be imagined. The women were beautiful, and facile as they were beautiful. All family ties were destroyed; marriage was a mere civil contract, which might be broken almost at the pleasure of the contracting parties. When husband and wife grew tired of one another, they had only to appear before the authorities and express their desire for separation, and they were henceforth strangers; a separation of six months constituted a divorce. Many women still young, had families by three different husbands, all of whom were living. The Christian religion was still under the ban of the law; the calendar of the Jacobins, which began

VOL. XL.

D

with the year one of the Republic, was still in use; in the place of Sunday, the tenth day was set apart as a holiday or festival.

Dancing was the all pervading rage; the art was equally cultivated by men and women, and more homage was paid to a celebrated dancer than to a victorious general.* Vestris, Trénis, Gardel, were the heroes of the salons; the moment they arrived place was made for them, and an eager crowd formed a ring to watch them develop their marvellously intricate figures. The dances of the women resembled those of the Bacchantes; now languishing and voluptuous, now sprightly and vigorous, the cashmere shawl playing an important part as they floated gracefully through the figures, or with interwoven arms struck picturesque tableaux.

The first five years of the Revolution had been an interregnum in literature; who could write under la Terreur? Even Madame de Staël, hundreds of miles away, among the peaceful lakes and mountains of Switzerland, could not pen a line. "I should even have reproached myself for a thought," she says, writing of that time, "as something too independent of grief." Such was the effect produced upon all intellectual minds by that awful period. What was written under the Directory had as well, and much better, been left unwritten. The poetry was frigid, soulless, bombastic; odes to that sham Liberty in which no one now believed. The prose was sceptical, atheistical, and filthily lewd, to a degree that would have astonished even the authors of the Regency. There were two coteries, one of which still clung to Jacobinism, at the head of which was Marie-Joseph Chénier, the other, at the head of which was La Harpe, upheld the new ideas, and each ceaselessly and virulently lampooned the other.

The irrepressible Parisians had already forgotten the cruel reign of la mère Guillotine, and even commemorated her work in their amusements. They had their bals des victimes, to which no persons were admissible unless they had lost a relative under la Terreur, and each visitor to which was compelled to wear a band of crape round the arm. All were filled with a childish joy, such as one feels upon awaking from some dream of terrible peril, at the thought that they had survived the slaughter of the Revolution. But all things, manners, opinions, inclinations, were turning back towards aristocracy and monarchy; the Republic was already dead, only awaiting a hand strong enough to bury it to disappear from the world.

So la mère Guillotine, with all her labours, has not purged and purified humanity; society is little different, except that it is very much coarser, than it was in the salons of Du Barry. Did all those rivers of blood then flow in vain? Did all those mountains of corpses piled up in revolutionary fury offend the face of Heaven in vain? IN

*This is the period from which date the old caricatures of the dancing Frenchman.