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that that her genius was most thoroughly aroused, was most thoroughly original. Conversation,' says Ste.-Beuve, 'was her inspiration and her muse.' She possessed the great secret of uniting the most incongruous elements. In tête-à-tête,' writes her biographer, Madame Necker Saussure, her conversation was a thing that could not be conceived by those who have not enjoyed the privilege of her intimacy. Her finest pages, her most eloquent discourses in society, are far from equalling in all-absorbing power that which she spoke, when, not being compelled to conform to the ideas of certain auditors, she gave free play to the daring and original thoughts which filled her soul. Then her grand genius, spreading its wings, took flight; then, not knowing whither it might lead her, a witness rather than mistress of her own inspiration, she exercised a power more than natural, to which she herself seemed to submit a power good or bad, but over which she had no control.' So brilliant a personage could not fail to rouse the jealousy of the small-souled despot. The night after her friend Benjamin Constant made his famous speech against the growing power of the First Consul her salons were deserted; Napoleon suspected her to be the author of the speech, and she was commanded to quit Paris. After travelling for two years in Italy and Germany, she settled down in exile at Coppet, on the Lake of Geneva, which had afforded her shelter during the horrors of the Revolution. But even there Bonaparte's persecution reached her; he ordered every copy of her great work, De l'Allemagne,' to be destroyed, because neither the Emperor nor his army had been mentioned in a work which turned on purely literary subjects. 'Have we then made war upon Germany for eighteen years,' cried the Minister of Police, who waited upon her for an explanation, ' in order that a person should print a book without speaking of us? That book shall be destroyed, and the author ought to be sent to Vincennes.'

The two great queens of society being banished, the salons of Madame Joséphine Bonaparte-soon to become imperial-became omnipotent in their influence. The aristocratic refinement of Madame Récamier's assemblies, the intellectual brilliancy of those of Madame de Staël, were of the ancien régime; the réunions of Joséphine, like those of the Directory, were typical of the age. Here were gathered all the crude, inharmonious creations of the Revolution. Parvenus, who had grown rich upon the plunder of the aristocrats; fervid republicans, who retained nothing of their creed save boorish manners, and who licked the tyrant's boots with fulsome adulation; and, far outnumbering and outweighing all the rest, soldiers, men who had risen, and deservedly, by their bravery,

VOL. XXXV. NO. CXXXVII.

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from the ranks of sans-culotteism to be generals and marshals. Their manners strongly savoured of the alley and the camp, and, fine fellows as they were, they were sadly out of place in gilded drawing-rooms. Still more so were their partners, who had not had even the advantage of that disciplinary training which renders the soldier always so superior to the class from which he has been drawn. These women, raised from the lowest types of Parisian life, decked out in gaudy costumes and magnificent jewels-the plunder of the battle-field-rendered themselves still greater monstrosities by their awkward attempts at fine manners. The classical costumes of the Directory had degenerated into huge, hideous turbans, surrounding foreheads covered with bull-like curls, into narrow-skirted, short-waisted dresses, which still live in the old caricatures. Being totally destitute of education, dancing was their only amusement. Masquerades were much in fashion; and it was a species of entertainment Napoleon greatly favoured, since it afforded such admirable scope for his spy system; he himself sometimes attended these assemblies on that mission. Ladies of haut ton frequented these balls, but not to dance; enveloped in dominoes, their faces concealed by masks, they came to coquette with their male friends, whose task it was through this disguise and a feigned voice to guess their identity.

There were many of the old noblesse, however, who did not disdain to frequent the salons of the Tuileries, and dukes and peers of the old blue blood were proud to display their ribbons in the imperial ante-room. It is astonishing,' said Talleyrand one day, 'how many emigrant ladies of the old Court wish me to force them to become dames d'honneur in the new!' When Bonaparte became emperor, his salons were as gorgeous and the etiquette as rigid as had been those of the Bourbons. The fairy splendours,' says Lady Morgan in 'La France,'' of the Caliph Aaron-al-Raschid were united to the cumbrous magnificence of the Middle Ages. The stately formalities of the Escurial presided over the circles of the Tuileries, and the costumes of the Valois and Medici fell in heavy folds over forms which had long exhibited their symmetry in the adhesive drapery of Greek sculpture.' The morals of the Court were as voluptuous as its surroundings; Napoleon insisted upon all his officers marrying, that more soldiers might be born into the world; as husbands and wives were frequently separated for years a day or two after the ceremony, the morality of the society may be imagined. There were two vices of the old régime that were discouraged under the new-gambling, which the emperor strictly prohibited within his palaces, and gastronomy; accustomed to soldiers' hard fare, he cared little for

the pleasures of the table, which consequently became unfashionable.

In the Faubourg St. Germain, among a little colony of exclusive aristocrats, who disdained to humble themselves to the parvenu usurper, there still existed a few salons of the old days, in which the old marquis and the old marquise, wrinkled and tottery, still addressed one another in the old language of gallantry and punctilious politeness, and sighed over and called up reminiscences of that old world which was to them far more real than the phantasmagoria passing around. There Rousseau, Voltaire, the Encyclopédistes, were still criticised as though their doctrines were still in theory, and had not swept as a whirlwind over the earth, uprooting and destroying all that opposed them. The Church, the King, the noblesse, were talked of as though they were living entities, instead of defunct states, never, apparently, to be resuscitated. The costumes were as antique as the manners, and belonged to all three reigns preceding the Revolution; the headdress of a Montespan or a Maintenon was to be seen side by side with the bonnets à papillon pointés of Dudeffand or Geoffrin, and the fichu de soufflet and négligé of Polignac or Lamballe. Yet the parvenu Napoleon would have done much to win over to his side those poor old ghosts, whose submission would have given him something of the prestige of tradition, and there was no opinion to which he was so sensitive as to theirs. After a great victory he would write to Talleyrand, What do they think of me in the Faubourg St. Germain now?'

Lady Morgan gives us in her book some graphic sketches of this society. The circles of the ancient nobility are formal and precise to a degree that imposes perfect restraint; the ladies are all seated à la ronde, the gentlemen either leaning on the backs of chairs or separated into small compact groups. Everybody rises at the entrance of a new guest and immediately resumes his seat, which is never finally quitted until the moment of departure. There is no bustling, no gliding, no shifting of places for purposes of coquetry or views of flirtation; all is repose and quietude among the most animated people in the world.' 'But,' she adds, at the same time, in the mixed assemblies there is plenty of freedom, the women move hither and thither, the men lounge and sit with their elbows on the table, and even their feet upon the fender.'

It is high birth,' said the Comtesse de Pastoret, rather than high rank, that is in estimation in France; but neither are marked in private society by those minute forms of precedence to which you free-born republican English pay such minute observance. At Court our dukes have their place, and our duchesses their tabourets ;

but in the salon, if any distinction is made, it is in favour of genius, celebrity, or age, while to be a stranger is to be an état in itself. ... I have seen Denon and Humboldt received with delight when princes and ministers were treated with indifference.'

Ere passing on to the society of the Restoration, let us take a backward glance at the fortunes of one of its queens. To fill the measure of his revenge, Napoleon prohibited Madame Récamier's return to France, for having dared to visit Madame de Staël in her exile, and for a little while she took up her abode at Coppet. It was there she met Prince Augustus of Prussia, a handsome, chivalrous young gentleman, who, like every other man who came beneath the influence of her fascinations, fell desperately in love with her; and for the first time her own heart was touched. He begged her to have her formal marriage annulled, and pleaded so eloquently that she wrote to M. Récamier, who was still in France, to ask his consent. His answer was that he would reply if she desired it, but reminded her of the affection he had felt for her from her childhood, of his misfortunes, &c., which pleading more effectually bound her than would his refusal. Sure of success, the Prince was preparing for their nuptials, when the news came that all was broken off between them. In vain then and thereafter did he implore her to change her decision; she remained firm to it. Through the remainder of his life her image was his most cherished memory, her picture was the principal ornament of his palace, and a ring she had given him was buried with him. The selfishness of the man who could not even plead the deprivation of her society, since he was not, nor was he likely to be, in the enjoyment of it, need not be commented upon. But the story gives us a suspicion that Madame's immaculateness throughout so many temptations must have been greatly due to coldness of heart. After remaining with Madame de Staël a short time, she took up her abode at Chalons-sur-Marne; she afterwards travelled to Rome and Naples, and was everywhere received, by Pope and King, by noble and artist, with the most profound respect and admiration. During her travels she visited England-crowds, attracted by her beauty and elegance, used to follow her when she promenaded in Kensington Gardens, and the Prince Regent thought himself honoured by being permitted to carry her shawl.

Madame Récamier, with Madame de Staël, was among the first who flocked back to Paris at the Restoration; her husband's fortunes had been restored, and she had inherited a considerable property from her mother; thus upon her return her salons were as brilliant and as magnificent as ever. But society had undergone another metamorphosis, and the réunions under Louis XVIII.

scarcely more resembled those of the Directory and the Empire than they did the assemblies of the Voltaire and Rousseau times.

Lady Morgan, who visited Paris in 1816, gives an admirable description, in the book I have before twice quoted, of the heterogeneous condition of French society in the first years of the Restoration. The agitated surface, still heaving with recent commotion, was strewn with relics of remote times thrown up from the bosom of oblivion, and it was covered with specimens of all the recent political systems which had reigned in France since the great social irruption. Characters belonging to different ages, opinions supported in distant eras, dogmas the most novel, prejudices the most antiquated, philosophy the most sceptical, bigotry the most inveterate, opposition the most violent, submission the most abject, all appeared mingling on the scene of daily intercourse, as if the discomfiture of some powerful enchanter had suddenly released the multifarious victims of magic influence, who, resuming their peculiar forms, presented an assembly at once the most singular and contradictory.' Voltairianism had been the fashion of the salons of the last century; Christianity was the fashion of those of the Restoration. The Nihilism of the Revolution had produced reaction, and the man who first gave form and voice to the movement was Chateaubriand. 'Le Génie du Christianisme' was received with as much enthusiasm by the new generation as had been Rousseau's Contrat Social,' Helvetius's' De l'Esprit,' or Holbach's Système de la Nature,' by the past. After the arid cynicism of the philosophes, the glowing rhetoric and poetic devotion of the noble writer came upon the world like a fountain of sparkling waters to wanderers in the desert, and French society was now nothing if not Christian. In literature André Chénier and his coterie alone fought against the new spirit that was abroad. The darlings of the salons were the noble Alfred de Vigny, sweetest of poets; Alphonse de Lamartine, the Byron, christianised, of France; Victor Hugo, then as ardent a royalist, and as implacable against the revolutionists, as he is now uncompromising as a communist and hater of kings. Then there were Alfred de Musset, Lamennais, De Maistre. These men, the voices of the new ideas, were received everywhere with homage and delight, equally by the exclusives of the Faubourg St. Germain as in the purely literary circle over which presided the brilliant authoress of 'Corinne.' But this revival, both of religion and of the literary salon, was but evanescent. Les bohêmes were born, were growing to manhood in their miserable garrets, were preparing to flood France with a new literature of scepticism and revolution; scepticism as different from the polished cynicism of Voltaire & Co.