CHAPTER XI.

One afternoon, about six months after the opening of our story,

Mrs. Kinloch and her son were talking together concerning the progress

of his suit. He complained that he was no nearer the point than on the

first day he and Mildred rode out together. "It was like rounding Cape

Horn," he said, "where a ship might lie twenty days and drift back as

fast as she got ahead by tacking." In spite of all his attention and

kindness, Mildred was merely courteous in return;--he could not get

near her. If she smiled, it seemed as though it was from behind a

grating, as in a nunnery. Her pulse was always firm; and if her eye

was soft, it was steady as the full moon. He didn't believe she had

any blood in her. If she was in love with that fellow, she kept it

pretty closely covered up.

Mrs. Kinloch encouraged her son to persevere; she was sure he had not

been skilful. "Mildred," she said, "was not to be won with as little

trouble as a silly, low-bred girl, like--like Lucy, for instance."

"What the deuse are you always bringing up Lucy to me for?" said the

dutiful son.

"Don't speak so!"

"Confound it! I must. You keep a fellow shut up here for six months,

going to meeting five times a week; you give him no chance to work off

his natural spirits, and the devil in him will break out

somewhere. It's putting a stopper in a volcano; if you don't allow a

little fire and smoke, you're bound to have an earthquake."

After this philosophical digression, the first topic was resumed, and

Mrs. Kinloch gave the young man some counsel, drawn from her own

experience or observation, touching the proper mode of awakening and

cultivating the tender passion. It is not every mother that does so

much for her son, but then few mothers have so urgent a motive.

"_What_ was it that she advised him to do," did you ask? Really,

I've quite forgotten; and I am sure Mrs. Kinloch forgot also, at least

for that day, because something occurred which turned her thoughts for

the time in quite a different direction.

The ponies were brought out for Hugh and Mildred to take their

customary canter. The young heiress, for whom so much time and pains

were spent, looked ill; the delicate flush had vanished from her

cheek; she seemed languid, and cheerful only by effort. A moment after

they had gone, as Mrs. Kinloch closed the door, for it was a raw

November day, she saw and picked up a rudely-folded letter in the

hall. "Good-bye, Lucy Ransom," were the words she read. They were

enough. Mrs. Kinloch felt that her heart was struck by a bolt of

ice. "Poor, misguided, miserable girl!" she said. "Why did I not see

that something was wrong? I felt it, I knew it,--but only as one knows

of evil in a dream. Who can calculate the mischief that will come of

this? O God! to have my hopes of so many years ruined, destroyed, by a

wretch whose power and existence even I had not once thought of! Has

she drowned herself, or fled to the city to hide her disgrace? But if

this should be imagination merely! She may have run away with some

lubberly fellow from the factory, whom she was ashamed to marry at

home. But no! she was too sad last evening when she asked to go to her

grandmother's for a day. What if"--The thought coursed round her brain

like fire on a train of gunpowder,--flew quicker than words could

utter it; and the woman bounded to her bureau, as though with muscles

of steel. She clutched at the papers and bank-notes in her private

drawer, and looked and counted them over a dozen times before she

could satisfy herself. Her thin fingers nervously opened the packages

and folds,--the papers crackling as her eye glanced over them. They

were there; but not _all_. She pored over the mystery,--her

thoughts running away upon every side-avenue of conjecture, and as

often returning to the frightful, remediless fact before her. She was

faint with sudden terror. By degrees she calmed herself, wiped the

cold sweat from her forehead, smiled at her fright, and sat down

again, with an attempt at self-control, to look through the drawers

thoroughly. As she went on, the tremor returned, and before she had

finished the fruitless search her heart beat so as to stop her breath;

she gasped in an agony that the soul rarely feels more than once in

this life. She shut up the drawers, walked up and down the room,

noticed with a shudder her own changed expression as she passed before

the mirror, and strove in vain to give some order to her confused and

tumultuous thoughts. At length she sat down exhausted. She was

startled by a knock. Opening the door, there in a newly-furbished

suit, with clean linen, and a brown wig worn for the first time on his

hitherto shining head, stood Theophilus Clamp. He had even picked a

blossom from the geranium in the hall and was toying with it like a

bashful boy.

"A fine day, Ma'am!" said he, as he took a seat.

"Yes, very," she answered, mechanically, scarcely looking up.

"The young folks have gone out to ride, I suppose."

"Yes, Sir."--A pause, in which Mrs. Kinloch covered her face with her

handkerchief.

"You don't seem well, Ma'am. Shall I call Lucy?"

"Lucy is gone," she answered,--quickly adding, "gone to her

grandmother's."

"Well, that is singular. I've been today to look at my land above the

old lady's house, and she asked me to send word to Lucy to come up and

see her."

"To-day?"

"Yes, Ma'am; not two hours ago."

Mrs. Kinloch was rapidly revolving probabilities. What interest had

Lucy to interfere with her affairs? As for Mildred, she was not to be

thought of as prying into secrets; she was too innocent. Hugh was too

careless. Who more than this man Clamp was likely to have done or

procured the mischief? "Have you given her the message?"

"Of course not, Ma'am,--how could I?"

"Then you haven't sent Lucy away on any errand?"

"Certainly not, Madam," said the lawyer, beginning to wince under the

cross-examination. "Lucy's gone, you say; didn't she leave things all

right,--your papers, and--and so forth?"

"Papers? Lucy is not presumed to know that I _have_ any papers;

if any are missing, I'll warrant they are in the hands of some one who

knows at least enough to read them."

"She suspects me," thought the lawyer, "but can't have discovered that

hers are only copies; they're too well done." He then added aloud,

"Perhaps, Mrs. Kinloch, if you had honored me, your associate in the

administration of the estate, with your confidence touching the

private papers you speak of, I might have saved you some trouble in

keeping them."

"Very likely; but no one spoke of papers beside yourself," she

replied, with a trace of sarcasm in the tone which ill suited the

expression of her pallid face and drooping head.

"I'm sorry to see you looking so careworn, Mrs. Kinloch," said he,

with his blandest air. "I intended to bring up a topic more agreeable,

it is to be hoped, than runaway house-maids or old documents." He

rubbed his hands softly and turned his eyes with a glance meant to be

tender towards the place where her chair stood; if he had been a cat,

he would have purred the while.

Mrs. Kinloch now, for the first time, observed the wig, the unusual

look of tidiness, and, above all, the flower in his hand; she also saw

the crucified smile that followed his last remark. "The ridiculous old

fool!" thought she,--"what can he mean?" But to him she translated

it,--

"What is the more agreeable topic?"

"Really, you attack me like a lawyer. Don't you know, my dear Madam,

how it confuses one to be sharply interrogated?"

"It would be something novel to see you confused, Squire Clamp."

"Pray, don't banter, Mrs. Kinloch. I hoped to find you in a more

complaisant humor. There are topics which cannot be discussed with the

square precision of legal rules,--thoughts that require sympathy

before they can be expressed." And he dropped his eyes with a

ludicrous sigh.

"Oh, I appreciate your tender susceptibilities. Please consider me as

asking the question again in the most engaging manner."

His new wig was becoming uncomfortable, and he fidgeted in his chair,

twirling the luckless blossom.

"Why, Mrs. Kinloch, the long regard I entertained for your late

lamented husband,--ah, I mean my regard for you,--ah, my lonely

domicil,--ah, since the decease of my--my sainted wife,--ah, and since

the Scripture says it is not good for man to live alone,--ah, your

charming qualities and many virtues,--not that your fortune,--ah,--I

mean to say, that, though not rich, I am not grasping,--and the

cottage where you lived would be a palace,--ah, for me, if not

unworthy,--ah, no desire to unduly shorten the period of

mourning,--ah, but life is short and uncertain"----

There was a dead silence. His mouth was vainly working, and his

expression confused and despairing. The flower had wilted in his moist

hand. Little streams of perspiration trickled down his face, to be

mopped up by his bandanna. Such was the ordeal of talking hollow

sentiment to a cool and self-possessed woman. She enjoyed the

exhibition for a time,--as what woman would not? But the waves of her

trouble rushed back upon her, and the spirit of mischief and coquetry

was overwhelmed. So she answered,--

"You are pleased to be polite,--perhaps gallant. You must excuse me

from taking part in such conversation to-day, however little is meant

by it,--and the less meant the better,--I am not well."

She rose feebly, and walked towards the door with as much dignity as

her trembling frame could assume. He was abashed; his fine speeches

jumbled in meaningless fragments, his airy castle ready to topple on

his unlucky head. He would have been glad to rebuke her fickle humor,

as he thought it; but he knew he had made a fool of himself, so he

merely said,--

"No offence, I hope, Ma'am; none meant, certainly. Wish you

good-afternoon, Ma'am. Call and see you again some day, and hope to

find you better."

_Would_ he find her better? While the mystery remained, while the

ruin of her hopes impended, what could restore to her the

cheerfulness, the courage, the self-command she had lost?

[To be continued.]

"BRINGING OUR SHEAVES WITH US."

The time for toil is past, and night has come,--

The last and saddest of the harvest-eves;

Worn out with labor long and wearisome,

Drooping and faint, the reapers hasten home,

Each laden with his sheaves.

Last of the laborers thy feet I gain,

Lord of the harvest! and my spirit grieves

That I am burdened not so much with grain

As with a heaviness of heart and brain;--

Master, behold my sheaves!

Few, light, and worthless,--yet their trifling weight

Through all my frame a weary aching leaves;

For long I struggled with my hapless fate,

And staid and toiled till it was dark and late,--

Yet these are all my sheaves.

Full well I know I have more tares than wheat,--

Brambles and flowers, dry stalks, and withered leaves

Wherefore I blush and weep, as at thy feet

I kneel down reverently, and repeat,

"Master, behold my sheaves!"

I know these blossoms, clustering heavily

With evening dew upon their folded leaves,

Can claim no value nor utility,--

Therefore shall fragrancy and beauty be

The glory of my sheaves.

So do I gather strength and hope anew;

For well I know thy patient love perceives

Not what I did, but what I strove to do,--

And though the full, ripe ears be sadly few,

Thou wilt accept my sheaves.

FARMING LIFE IN NEW ENGLAND.

New England does not produce the bread she eats, nor the raw materials

of the fabrics she wears. A multitude of her purely agricultural towns

are undergoing, more or less rapidly, a process of depopulation. Yet

these facts exist by the side of positive advances in agricultural

science and decided improvements in the means and modes of farming.

The plough is perfected, and the theory of ploughing is

understood. The advantages of thorough draining are universally

recognized, and tiles are for sale everywhere. Mowing and reaping

machines have ceased to be a novelty upon our plains and meadows. The

natural fertilizers have been analyzed, and artificial nutrients of

the soil have been contrived. The pick and pride of foreign herds

have regenerated our neat stock, and the Morgan and the Black-Hawk eat

their oats in our stalls. The sheepfold and the sty abound with choice

blood. Sterling agricultural journals are on every farmer's table, and

Saxton's hand-books upon agricultural specialties are scattered

everywhere. Public shows and fairs bring on an annual exacerbation of

the agricultural fever, which is constantly breaking out in new

places, beyond the power of the daily press to chronicle. Yet it is

too evident that the results are not at all commensurate with the

means under tribute and at command. What is the reason?

In looking at the life of the New England farmer, the first fact that

strikes us is, that it is actually a very different thing from what it

might be and ought to be. There dwells in every mind, through all

callings and all professions, the idea that the farmer's life is, or

may be, is, or should be, the truest and sweetest life that man can

live. The merchant may win all the prizes of trade, the professional

man may achieve triumphs beyond his hopes, the author may find his

name upon every lip, and his works accounted among the nation's

treasures, and all may move amid the whirl and din of the most

inspiring life, yet there will come to every one, in quiet

evening-hours, the vision of the old homestead, long since forsaken;

or the imagination will weave a picture of its own,--a picture of

rural life, so homely, yet so beautiful, that the heart will breathe a

sigh upon it, the eye will drop a tear upon it, and the voice will

say, "It were better so!"

In a city like Boston there are farms enough imagined every year to

make another New England. Could the fairest fancies of that congeries

of minds be embodied and exhibited, we should see green meadows

sparkling with morning dew,--silver-slippered rivulets skipping into

musical abysses,--quiet pasture-lands shimmering so sleepily in the

sun that the lazy flocks and herds forget to graze, and lie winking

and ruminating under the trees,--and yellow fields of grain, along the

hill-sides, billowy in the breeze, and bending before the shadows of

the clouds that sail above them. And mingling and harmonizing with

these visions, we should hear the lowing of kine, and the tinkle of

the bell that leads the flock, and the shout of the boy behind the

creeping plough, and the echoes of the axe, and the fall of the tree

in the distant forest, and the rhythmical clangor, softened into a

metallic whisper by the distance, of the mowers whetting their

scythes. With these visions and these sounds there would come to the

minds which give them birth convictions that rural life is the best

life, and resolutions that, by-and-by, in some golden hour, when the

sun of life begins to lengthen the eastward shadows, that life shall

be enjoyed, and that the soul shall pass at last from the quiet scenes

of Nature into those higher scenes which they symbolize. There is a

thought in all this that the farm is nearer heaven than the street,--a

reminiscence of the first estate, when man was lord of Eden; and this

thought, old as art and artificial life, cannot be rooted out of the

mind. It has a life of its own, independent of reason, above instinct,

among the quickest intuitions of the soul.

Now this idea, so universal, so identical in millions of minds,

springing with such spontaneity in the midst of infinitely varied

circumstances, abiding with such tenacity in every soul, can have its

basis nowhere save in a Divine intention and a human possibility. The

cultivation of the farm is the natural employment of man. It is upon

the farm that virtue should thrive the best, that the body and the

mind should be developed the most healthfully, that temptations should

be the weakest, that social intercourse should be the simplest and

sweetest, that beauty should thrill the soul with the finest raptures,

and that life should be tranquillest in its flow, longest in its

period, and happiest in its passage and its issues. This is the

general and the first ideal of the farmer's life, based upon the

nature of the farmer's calling and a universally recognized human

want. Why does the actual differ so widely from the ideal? It is not

because the farmer's labor is hard and constant, alone. There is no

fact better established than that it is through the habitual use both

of the physical and mental powers that the soul achieves, or receives,

its most healthful enjoyment, and acquires that tone which responds

most musically to the touch of the opportunities of leisure. Why,

then, we repeat, does the actual differ so widely from the ideal?

A general answer to this question is, that that is made an end of life

which should be but an incident or a means. Life is confounded with

labor, and thrift with progress; and material success is the aim to

which all other aims are made subordinate. There is no fact in

physiology better established than that hard labor, followed from day

to day and year to year, absorbing every thought and every physical

energy, has the direct tendency to depress the intellect, blunt the

sensibilities, and animalize the man. In such a life, all the

energies of the brain and nervous system are directed to the support

of nutrition and the stimulation of the muscular system. Man thus

becomes a beast of burden,--the creature of his calling; and though he

may add barn to barn and acre to acre, he does not lead a life which

rises in dignity above that of the beasts which drag his plough. He

eats, he works, he sleeps. Surely, there is no dignity in a life like

this; there is nothing attractive and beautiful and good in it. It is

a mean and contemptible life; and all its maxims, economies,

associations, and objects are repulsive to a mind which apprehends

life's true enjoyments and ends. We say that it is a pestilent

perversion. We say that it is the sale of the soul to the body; it is

turning the back upon life, upon growth, upon God, and descending into

animalism.

The true ideal of the farmer's life--of any life--contemplates

something outside of, and above, the calling which is its instrument.

The farmer's life is no better than the life of a street-sweeper, if

it rise no higher than the farmer's work. If the farmer, standing

under the broad sky, breathing the pure air, listening to the song of

birds, watching the progress of

"The great miracle that still goes on,"

to work the transformation of the brown seeds which he drops into the

soil into fields of green and gold, and gazing upon landscapes

shifting with the seasons and flushed with new tints through every

sunlit and moonlit hour, does not apprehend that his farm has higher

uses for him than those of feeding his person and his purse, he might

as well dwell in a coal-mine.

Our soil is sterile, our modes of farming have been rude until within

a few years; and under the circumstances,--with the Yankee notion that

the getting of money is the chief end of man,--exclusive devotion to

labor has been deemed indispensable to success. The maxims of Franklin

have been literally received and adopted as divine truth. We have

believed that to labor is to be thrifty, that to be thrifty is to be

respectable, that to be respectable is to afford facilities for being

still more thrifty; and our experience is, that with increased thrift

comes increased labor. This is the circle of our ambitions and

rewards. All begins and ends in labor. The natural and inevitable

result of this is both physical and mental deterioration.

It is doubtful whether the world furnishes a finer type of man,

physically and intellectually, than the Irish gentleman. He is

handsome, large, courageous,--a man of fine instincts, brilliant

imagination, courtly manners, and full, vital force. By the side of

the Irish gentleman, there has grown for centuries the Irish

peasant. He is ugly, of stunted stature, and pugnacious; and he

produces children like himself. The two classes started from a common

blood; they now present the broadest contrast. We do not say that

freedom from severe labor on one side, and confinement to it on the

other, are entirely responsible for this contrast; difference of food

and other obvious causes have had something to do with it; but we say

that hard labor has, directly and indirectly, degraded from a true

style of manhood the great mass of the Irish peasantry. They are a

marked class, and carry in their forms and faces the infallible

insignia of mental and physical degeneration.

We would by no means compare New England farmers with the Irish

peasantry. We only present the contrast between these two classes of

the Irish population as the result of unremitting toil on one side,

and a more rational kind of life on the other. If we enter a New

England church, containing a strictly rural assembly, and then visit

another containing a class whose labor is lighter, and whose style of

life is based upon different ideas, we shall see a contrast less

marked, perhaps, but presenting similar features. The farming

population of New England is not a handsome population, generally.

The forms of both men and women are angular; their features are not

particularly intellectual; their movements are not graceful; and their

calling is evident by indubitable signs. The fact that the city

assemblage is composed of a finer and higher grade of men, women, and

children is of particular moment to our argument, because it is

composed of people who are only one, two, or three removes from a

rural origin. The city comes from the country; the street is

replenished by the farm; but the city children, going back to the

farm, show that a new element has been introduced into their

blood. The angles are rounded; the face is brighter; the movements are

more graceful; there is in every way a finer development.

There is probably no better exponent of the farmer's life than the

farmer's home. We propose to present the portrait of such a home, and,

while we offer it as a just outline of the farmer's home generally, in

districts removed from large social centres, we gladly acknowledge the

existence of a great multitude of happy exceptions. But the sketch:--A

square, brown house; a chimney coming out of the middle of a roof; not

a tree nearer than the orchard, and not a flower at the door. At one

end projects a kitchen; from the kitchen projects a wood-shed and

wagon-cover, occupied at night by hens; beyond the wood-shed, a

hog-pen, fragrant and musical. Proceeding no farther in this

direction, we look directly across the road, to where the barn stands,

like the hull of a great black ship-of-the-line, with its port-holes

opened threateningly upon the fort opposite, out of one of which a

horse has thrust his head for the possible purpose of examining the

strength of the works. An old ox-sled is turned up against the wall

close by, where it will have the privilege of rotting. This whole

establishment was contrived with a single eye to utility. The barn

was built in such a manner that its deposits might be convenient to

the road which divides the farm, while the sty was made an attachment

of the house for convenience in feeding its occupants.

We enter the house at the back door, and find the family at dinner in

the kitchen. A kettle of soap-grease is stewing upon the stove, and

the fumes of this, mingled with those that were generated by boiling

the cabbage which we see upon the table, and by perspiring men in

shirt-sleeves, and by boots that have forgotten or do not care where

they have been, make the air anything but agreeable to those who are

not accustomed to it. This is the place where the family live. They

cook everything here for themselves and their hogs. They eat every

meal here. They sit here every evening, and here they receive their

friends. The women in this kitchen toil incessantly, from the time

they rise in the morning until they go to bed at night. Here man and

woman, sons and daughters, live, in the belief that work is the great

thing, that efficiency in work is the crowning excellence of manhood

and womanhood, and willingly go so far into essential self-debasement,

sometimes, as to contemn beauty and those who love it, and to glory

above all things in brute strength and brute endurance.

Here we are ready to state the point and the lesson of our

discussion:--The real reason for the deterioration of agriculture in

New England is to be found in the fact, that the farmer's life and the

farmer's home, generally, are unloved and unlovable things, and in the

multitude of causes which have tended to make them so. Let the son of

such a home as we have pictured get a taste of a better life than

this, or, through sensibilities which he did not inherit, apprehend a

worthier style of existence, and what inducements, save those which

necessity imposes, can retain him there? He hates the farm, and will

flee from it at the first opportunity. If the New England farmer's

life were a loved and lovable thing, the New England boys could hardly

be driven from the New England hills. They would not only find a way

to live here, but they would make farming profitable. They would honor

the employment to which they are bred, and would leave it, save in

exceptional instances, for no other. It is not strange that the

country grows thin and the city plethoric. It is not strange that

mercantile and mechanical employments are thronged by young men,

running all risks for success, when the alternative is a life in which

they find no meaning, and no inspiring and ennobling influence.

The popular ideal of the farmer's life and home, to which we have

alluded, we believe to be what God intended. That life contemplates

the institution and maintenance of personal and social habits, and the

cultivation of tastes and faculties, separate from, and above, labor.

Every farm-house should be a residence of men and women, boys and

girls, who, appreciating something of the meaning and end of life,

rise from every period of labor into an atmosphere of intellectual and

social activity, or into some form of refined family enjoyment. It is

impossible to do this while surrounded with all the associations of

labor. If there is a room in every farmer's house where the work of

the family is done, there should be a room in every farmer's house

where the family should live,--where beauty should appeal to the eye,

where genuine comfort of appointments should invite to repose, where

books should be gathered, where neatness and propriety of dress should

be observed, and where labor may be forgotten. The life led here

should be labor's exceeding great reward. A family living like

this--and there are families that live thus--will ennoble and beautify

all their surroundings. There will be trees at their door, and

flowers in their garden, and pleasant and graceful architectural ideas

in their dwelling. Human life will stand in the foreground of such a

home,--human life, crowned with its dignities and graces,--while

animal life will be removed among the shadows, and the gross material

utilities, tastefully disguised, will be made to retire into an

unoffending and harmonious perspective.

But we have alluded to other causes than labor as in some measure

responsible for the unattractiveness of the farmer's life, and

affecting adversely the farming interest. These touch the matter at

various points, and are charged with greater or less importance. We

know of no one cause more responsible for whatever there may be of

physical degeneracy among the farming population than the treatment of

its child-bearing women; and this, after all, is but a result of

entire devotion to the tyrannical idea of labor. If there be one

office or character higher than all others, it is the office or

character of mother. Surely, the bringing into existence of so

marvellous a thing as a human being, and the training of that being

until it assumes a recognized relation to God and human society, is a

sacred office, and one which does not yield in dignity and importance

to any other under heaven. For a woman who faithfully fulfils this

office, who submits without murmuring to all its pains, who patiently

performs its duties, and who exhausts her life in a ceaseless overflow

of love upon those whom God has given her, no words can express a true

man's veneration. She claims the homage of our hearts, the service of

our hands, the devotion of our lives.

Yet what is the position of the mother in the New England farmer's

home? The farmer is careful of every animal he possesses. The

farm-yard and the stall are replenished with young, by creatures for

months dismissed from labor, or handled with intelligent care while

carrying their burden; because the farmer knows that only in this way

can he secure improvement, and sound, symmetrical development, to the

stock of his farm. In this he is a true, practical philosopher. But

what is his treatment of her who bears his children? The same

physiological laws apply to her that apply to the brute. Their strict

observance is greatly more imperative, because of her finer

organization; yet they are not thought of; and if the farm-yard fail

to shame the nursery, if the mother bear beautiful and well-organized

children, Heaven be thanked for a merciful interference with the

operation of its own laws! Is the mother in a farm-house ever regarded

as a sacred being? Look at her hands! Look at her face! Look at her

bent and clumsy form! Is it more important to raise fine colts than

fine men and women? Is human life to be made secondary and subordinate

to animal life? Is not she who should receive the tenderest and most

considerate ministries of the farmer's home, in all its appointments

and in all its service, made the ceaseless minister and servant of the

home and all within it, with utter disregard of her office? To expect

a population to improve greatly under this method is simply to expect

miracles; and to expect a farmer's life and a farmer's home to be

attractive, where the mother is a drudge, and secures less

consideration than the pets of the stall, is to expect impossibilities.

Another cause which has tended to the deterioration of the farmer's

life is its solitariness. The towns in New England which were settled

when the Indians were in possession of the country, and which, for

purposes of defence, were settled in villages, have enjoyed great

blessings; but a large portion of agricultural New England was

differently settled. It is difficult to determine why isolation

should produce the effect it does upon the family development. The

Western pioneer, who, leaving a New England community, plants himself

and his young wife in the forest, will generally become a coarse man,

and will be the father of coarse children. The lack of the social

element in the farmer's life is doubtless a cause of some of its most

repulsive characteristics. Men are constituted in such a manner, that

constant social contact is necessary to the healthfulness of their

sympathies, the quickness of their intellects, and the symmetrical

development of their powers. It matters little whether a family be

placed in the depths of a Western forest, or upon the top of a New

England hill; the result of solitude will be the same in kind, if not

in degree.

Now the farmer, partly from isolation and partly from absorption in

labor, is the most unsocial man in New England. The farmers are

comparatively few who go into society at all, who ever dine with their

neighbors, or who take any genuine satisfaction in the company of the

women whom their wives invite to tea. They may possibly be

farmers among farmers, but they are not men among men and

women. Intellectually, they are very apt to leave life where they

begin it. Socially, they become dead for years before they die. The

inhabitants of a city can have but a poor apprehension of the amount

of enjoyment and development that comes to them through social

stimulus. Like gold, humanity becomes bright by friction, and grows

dim for lack of it. So, we say, the farmer's life and home can never

be what they should be,--can never be attractive by the side of other

life containing a true social element,--until they have become more

social. The individual life must not only occupy a place above that of

a beast of burden, but that life must be associated with all congenial

life within its reach. The tree that springs in the open field, though

it be fed by the juices of a rood, through absorbents that penetrate

where they will, will present a hard and stunted growth; while the

little sapling of the forest, seeking for life among a million roots,

or growing in the crevice of a rock, will lift to the light its cap of

leaves upon a graceful stem, and whisper, even-headed, with the

stateliest of its neighbors. Men, like trees, were made to grow

together, and both history and philosophy declare that this Divine

intention cannot be ignored or frustrated with impunity.

Traditional routine has also operated powerfully to diminish the

attractiveness of agricultural employments. This cause, very happily,

grows less powerful from year to year. The purse is seen to have an

intimate sympathy with intelligent farming. Were we to say that God

had so constituted the human mind that routine will tire and disgust

it, we should say in effect that he never intended the farmer's life

to be one of routine. Nature has done all she can to break up routine.

While the earth swings round its orbit once a year, and turns on its

axis once in twenty-four hours,--while the tide ebbs and flows twice

daily, and the seasons come and go in rotation, every atom changes its

relations to every other atom every moment. Influences are tossed into

these skeleton cycles of motion and event which start a myriad of

diverse currents, and break up the whole surface of life and being

into a healthful confusion. There are never two days alike. The

motherly sky never gives birth to twin clouds. The weather shakes its

bundle of mysteries in our faces, and banters us with, "Don't you wish

you knew?" We prophesy rain upon the morrow, and wake with a bar of

golden sunlight on the coverlet. We foretell a hard winter, and,

before it is half gone, become nervous lest we should miss our supply

of ice. The fly, the murrain, the potato-rot, and the grasshoppers,

all have a divine office in tipping over our calculations. The

phantom host of the great North come out for parade without

announcement, and shoot their arrows toward the zenith, and flout the

stars with their rosy flags, and retire, leaving us looking into

heaven and wondering. Long weeks of drought parch the earth, and then

comes the sweet rain, and sets the flowers and the foliage

dancing. All the seasons are either very late or very early, or, for

some reason, "the most remarkable within the memory of man."

This is God's management for destroying routine within the law of

stated revolution, and for bringing the mind constantly into contact

with fresh influences. The soul, encased by a wall of adamantine

circumstances, and driven around a track of unvarying duties,

shrivels, or gets diseased. But these circumstances need not imprison

the farmer, nor these duties become the polished pavement of his

cell. He has his life among the most beautiful scenes of Nature and

the most interesting facts of Science. Chemistry, geology, botany,

meteorology, entomology, and a dozen other related or constituent

sciences,--what is intelligent farming but a series of experiments,

involving, first and last, all of these? What is a farm but a

laboratory where the most important and interesting scientific

problems are solved? The moment that any field of labor becomes

intelligently experimental, that moment routine ceases, and that field

becomes attractive. The most repulsive things under heaven become

attractive, on being invested with a scientific interest. All,

therefore, that a farmer has to do, to break up the traditional

routine of his method and his labor, is to become a scientific

farmer. He will then have an interest in his labor and its results

above their bare utilities. Labor that does not engage the mind has no

dignity; else the ox and the ass are kings in the world, and we are

but younger brothers in the royal family. So we say to every

farmer,--If you would make your calling attractive to yourself and

your boys, seek that knowledge which will break up routine, and make

your calling, to yourself and to them, an intelligent pursuit.

A recent traveller in England speaks enthusiastically of a visit which

he paid to an old farm-house in that country, and of the garden-farm

upon which it stood, which had descended from father to son through a

period of five hundred years. He found a family of charming

intelligence and the politest culture. That hallowed soil was a

beautiful body, of which the family interests and associations were

the soul. To be dissociated from that soil forever would be

regarded by its proprietors as almost equivalent to family

annihilation. Proprietorship in English soil is one of the prime

ambitions of the true Englishman; but we do not find in New England

any kindred sentiments of pride in landed property and family

affection for the paternal acres. The nomadic tribes of Asia would

seem to have quite as strong local attachments as Yankee landholders,

most of whom will sell their homesteads as readily as they will their

horses. This fact we cannot but regard as one among the many causes

which have conspired to despoil the farmer's calling of some of its

legitimate attractions. The son slips away from the old homestead as

easily as he does from the door of a hotel. Very likely his father has

rooted up all home attachments by talking of removing Westward ever

since the boy saw the light. This lack of affection for the family

acres is doubtless owing somewhat to the fact that in this country

landed property is not associated with political privilege, as it has

been in England; but this cannot be the sole reason; for the sentiment

has a genuine basis in nature, and, in not a few instances, an actual

existence amongst us.

Resulting from the operation of all the causes which we have briefly

noticed, there is another cause of the deterioration of farming life

in New England, which cannot be recovered from in many years. Actual

farming life has been brought into such harsh contrast with other

life, that its best materials have been sifted out of it, have slid

away from it. An inquiry at the doors of the great majority of farmers

would exhibit the general fact, that the brightest boys have gone to

college, or have become mechanics, or are teaching school, or are in

trade, or have emigrated to the West. There have been taken directly

out from the New England farming population its best elements,--its

quickest intelligence, its most stirring enterprise, its noblest and

most ambitious natures,--precisely those elements which were necessary

to elevate the standard of the farmer's calling and make it what it

should be. It is very easy to see why these men have not been retained

in the past; it is safe to predict that they will not be retained in

the future, unless a thorough reform be instituted. These men cannot

be kept on a routine farm, or tied to a home which has no higher life

than that of a workshop or a boarding-house. It is not because the

work of the farm is hard that men shun it. They will work harder and

longer in other callings for the sake of a better style of individual

and social life. They will go to the city, and cling to it while half

starving, rather than engage in the dry details and the hard and

homely associations of the life which they forsook.

The boys are not the only members of the farmer's family that flee

from the farmer's life. The most intelligent and most enterprising of

the farmer's daughters become school-teachers, or tenders of shops, or

factory-girls. They contemn the calling of their father, and will,

nine times in ten, marry a mechanic in preference to a farmer. They

know that marrying a farmer is a very serious business. They remember

their worn-out mothers. They thoroughly understand that the vow that

binds them in marriage to a farmer seals them to a severe and homely

service that will end only in death.

As a consequence of this sifting process, to which we have given but a

glance, a very decidedly depressing element is now being rapidly

introduced into New England farming life. The Irish girls have found

their way into the farmer's kitchen, and the Irish laborer has become

the annual "hired man." At present, there are no means of measuring

the effect of this new element; but it cannot fail to depress the tone

of farming society, and surround it with a new swarm of menial

associations.

In our judgment, there is but little in the improved modes of farming,

in scientific discoveries, and new mechanical appliances, to be relied

upon for the elevation of New England agriculture and the emancipation

of New England farming life. The farmer needs new ideas more than he

needs new implements. The process of regeneration must begin in the

mind, and not in the soil. The proprietor of that soil should be the

true New England gentleman. His house should be the home of

hospitality, the embodiment of solid comfort and liberal taste, the

theatre of an exalted family-life which shall be the master and not

the servant of labor, and the central sun of a bright and happy social

atmosphere. When this standard shall be reached, there will be no

fear for New England agriculture. The noblest race of men and women

the sun ever shone upon will cultivate these valleys and build their

dwellings upon these hills; and they will cling to a life which

blesses them with health, plenty, individual development, and social

progress and happiness. This is what the farmer's life may be and

should be; and if it ever rise to this in New England, neither prairie

nor savanna can entice her children away; and waste land will become

as scarce, at last, as vacant lots in Paradise.

LES SALONS DE PARIS.[1]

The title is an ambitious one, for the _salons_ of Paris are

Paris itself; and, from the days of the Fronde and of the Hôtel

Rambouillet down to our own, you may judge pretty accurately of what

is going on upon the great political stage of France by what is

observable in those green-rooms and _coulisses_ called the

Parisian drawing-rooms, and where, more or less, the actors of all

parties may be seen, either rehearsing their parts before the

performance, or seeking, after the performance is over, the several

private echoes of the general public sentiment that has burst forth

before the light of the foot-lamps. Shakspeare's declaration, that

"all the world's a stage," is nowhere so true as in the capital of

Gaul. There, most truly may it be said, are

----"All the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts."

Therefore might a profound and comprehensive study of the

drawing-rooms of Paris be in a manner a history of France in our own

times.

Madame Ancelot's little volume does not aim so high; nor, had it done

so, would its author have possessed the talent requisite for carrying

out such a design. Madame Ancelot is a writer of essentially

second-rate and subordinate capacity, and consequently her account of

those _salons de Paris_ that she has seen (and she by no means

saw them all) derives no charm from the point of view she takes. To

say the truth, she has no "point of view" of her own; she tells what

she saw, and (thus far we must praise her) she tells it very

conscientiously. Having waited in every instance till the people she

has to speak of were dead, Mme. Ancelot has a pretty fair field before

her for the display of her sincerity, and we, the public, who are

neither kith nor kin of the deceased, are the gainers thereby.

So interesting and so amusing is the subject Madame Ancelot has

chosen, that, in spite of her decided want of originality or even

talent in treating it, her book is both an amusing and an interesting

one. It is even more than that; for those who wish to have a correct

notion of certain epochs of the social civilization of modern France,

and of certain predominant types in French society during the

last forty years, Madame Ancelot's little volume is full of

instruction. Perhaps in no society, so much as in that of France, have

the political convulsions of the state reacted so forcibly upon the

relations of man to man, revolutionizing the homes of private persons,

even as the government and the monarchy were revolutionized. In

England, nothing of this kind is to be observed; and if you study

English society ten years, or twenty years, or fifty years after the

fall of Charles I., after the establishment of the Commonwealth, or

after the restoration of Charles II., the definitive exile of the

Stuarts, and the advent of a foreign dynasty to the throne, you find

everywhere its constitutive elements the same,--modified only by such

changes of time, circumstance, and fashion, as naturally, in every

country, modify the superficial aspect of all society. But in France,

it is the very _substratum_ of the social soil that is overturned, it

is the constitutive elements of society that are displaced; and the

consequence is a general derangement of all relative positions.

In what is still termed _la vieille société Française_, little or

nothing was left to chance, and one of its great characteristics was

order and the perfectly regular play of its machinery. Everything was

set down, _noted_, as it were, beforehand,--as strictly so as the

ceremonies of a grand diplomatic ceremony, after some treaty, or

marriage, or other occasion of solemn conference. Under this

_régime_, which endured till the Revolution of '93, (and even,

strangely enough, _beyond_ that period,) politeness was, of

course, the one chief quality of whosoever was well brought

up,--urbanity was the first sign of good company,--and for the simple

reason, that no one sought to infringe. There was no cause for

insolence, or for what in England is called "exclusiveness," because

there was no necessity to repel any disposition to encroach. No one

dreamed of the possibility of encroaching upon his neighbor's grounds,

or of taking, in the slightest degree, his neighbor's place.

The first French Revolution caused no such sudden and total disruption

of the old social traditions as has been generally supposed; and as

far as mere social intercourse and social conventionalities were

concerned, there was, even amongst the terrible popular dictators of

1793, more of the _tone_ of the _ci-devant_ good company

than could possibly be imagined. In later times, every one who knew

Fouché remembers that he was constantly in the habit of expressing his

indignation at the want of good-breeding of the young exquisites of

the Empire, and used perpetually to exclaim, "In _my time_" this

or that "would not have been allowed," or, "In _my_ time we were

accustomed to do" so and so. Now Fouché's "time" was that which is

regarded as the period of universal beheading and levelling.

It is certain, that, under the _régime_ of the Revolution itself,

bitter class-hatreds did not at first show themselves in the peaceful

atmosphere of society,--and that for more than one reason. First of

all, in a certain sense, "society," it may be said, was

_not_. Next, what subsisted of society was fragmentary, and was

formed by small isolated groups or coteries, pretty homogeneously

composed, or, when not so as to rank and station, rendered homogeneous

by community of suffering. It must not be imagined that only the

highest class in France paid for its opinions or its vanities with

loss of life and fortune. The victims were everywhere; for the changes

in the governing forces were so perpetual, that, more or less, every

particular form of envy and hatred had its day of power, and levelled

its blows at the objects of its special antipathy. In this way, the

aristocracy and the _bourgeoisie_ were often brought into

contact; marriages even were contracted, whether during imprisonment

or under the pressure of poverty, that never would have been dreamt of

in a normal state of things; and whilst parents of opposite conditions

shook hands in the scaffold-surveying _charrettes_, the children

either drew near to each other, in a mutual helpfulness, the principle

whereof was Christian charity, or met together to partake of

amusements, the aim whereof was oblivion. For several years, the turn

of every individual for execution might come, and therefore it was

difficult, on the other hand, to see who might also _not_ be a

friend.

This began to be modified under the Empire, but in a shape not

hitherto foreseen. Military glory began to long for what the genuine

Revolutionists termed "feudal distinctions." Napoleon was desirous of

a court and of an aristocracy; he set to work to create a

_noblesse_, and dukes and counts were fabricated by the

dozen. Very soon the strong love of depreciation, that is inherent in

every Frenchman, seized upon even the higher plebeian classes, and,

discontented as they were at seeing the liberties of the movement of

'89 utterly confiscated by a military chief, and antipathetic as they

have been, time out of mind, to what are called _les traineurs de

sabre_, the civilians of France, her _bourgeois_, who were to

have their day,--but with very different feelings in 1830,--joined

with the genuine Pre-Revolutionary aristocrats, and the _noblesse de

l'Empire_ was laughed at and taken _en grippe_. Here was, in

reality, the first wide breach made in France in the edifice of

good-breeding and good-manners; and those who have been eye-witnesses

to the metamorphosis will admit that the guillotine of Danton and

Robespierre did even less to destroy _le bon ton_ of the

_ancien régime_ than was achieved by the guard-room habits and

morals of Bonaparte's glorious troopers, rushing, as they did, booted

and spurred, into the emblazoned sanctuary of heraldic distinctions,

and taking, as it were, _la société_ by storm.

But soon another alliance and other enmities were to be formed. The

Empire fell; the Bourbons returned to France; Louis XVIII. recognized

the _noblesse_ of the Imperial government, and the constitution of

society as it had been battled for by the Revolution. At the same time

his court was filled with all the great historic names of the country,

who returned, no longer avowedly the first in authority, and therefore

prompt to condescend, but the first in presumption, and therefore

prompt to take offence. The new alliance that was formed was that of

the plebeian caste with the _noblesse de l'Empire_, against which it

had been previously so incensed. Notwithstanding all the efforts

sincerely made by Louis XVIII. to establish a constitutional

government and to promote a genuine constitutional feeling throughout

France, class-hatreds rose gradually to so violent a height that the

king's only occupation soon grew to be the balancing of expediencies.

He was forever obliged to reflect upon the choices he could make

around him, since each choice made from one party insured him a

hundred enemies in the party opposed. This, which was the political

part of the drama,--that which regarded the scenes played upon the

public stage,--had its instantaneous reflex, as we have already said

in the commencement of these pages, in the _salons_, which were the

green-rooms and _coulisses_. Urbanity, amenity of language, the bland

demeanor hitherto characterized as _la grâce Française_, all these

were at an end. Society in France, such as it had been once, the

far-famed model for all Europe, had ceased to exist. The ambition

which had once been identified with the cares of office or the dangers

of war now found sufficient food in the bickerings of party-spirit,

and revenged itself by _salon_ jokes and _salon_ impertinence for the

loss of a lead it either could not or would not take in

Parliament. The descendants of those very fathers and mothers who had,

in many cases, suffered incarceration, and death even, together, set

to hating each other cordially, because these would not abdicate what

those would not condescend to compete for. The _noblesse_ cried out,

that the _bourgeoisie_ was usurping all its privileges; and the

_bourgeoisie_ retorted, that the time for privilege was past. The two

classes could no longer meet together in the world, but formed utterly

different sets and _cliques_; and it must be avowed that neither of

the two gained in good-manners, or what may be called drawing-room

distinction.

From 1815 to 1830, the _noblesse_ had officially the

advantage. From 1830 to 1848, the _bourgeoisie_ ruled over the

land. But now was to be remarked another social phenomenon, that

complicated _salon_ life more than ever. The middle classes, we

say, were in power; they were in all the centres of political

life,--in the Chambers, in the ministries, in the king's councils, in

diplomacy; and with them had risen to importance the Imperial

aristocracy, whose representatives were to be found in every

department of the public service. All this while, the old families of

the _ancien régime_ shut themselves up among themselves entirely,

constituted what is now termed the _Faubourg St. Germain_, which

never was so exclusive or so powerful (socially speaking) as under

Louis Philippe, and a tacit combat between envy and disdain was

carried on, such as perhaps no modern civilization ever witnessed. The

Faubourg St. Germain arrogated to itself the privilege of exclusively

representing _la société Française_, and it must be confessed

that the behavior of its adversaries went far to substantiate its

claims.

Our purpose in these pages is not to touch upon anything connected

with politics, or we could show, that, whilst apparently severed from

all activity upon the more conspicuous field of the capital, the

ancient French families were employed in reëstablishing their

influence in the rural provincial centres; the result of which was the

extraordinary influx of Legitimist members into the Chamber formed by

the first Republican elections in 1848. But this is foreign to our

present aim. As to what regards French _society_, properly so

called, it was, from 1804, after the proclamation of the Empire, till

1848, after the fall of Louis Philippe, in gradual but incessant

course of sub-division into separate cliques, each more or less

bitterly disposed towards the others. From the moment when this began

to be the case, the edifice of French society could no longer be

studied as a whole, and it only remained to examine its component

parts as evidences of the tendencies of various classes in the nation.

In this assuredly not uninteresting study, Mme. Ancelot's book is of

much service; for a certain number of the different _salons_ she

names are, as it were, types of the different stages civilization has

attained to in the city which chooses to style itself "the brain of

Europe."

The description, given in the little book before us, of what in Paris

constitutes a genuine _salon_, is a tolerably correct one. "A

_salon_," says Mme. Ancelot, "is not in the least like one of

those places in a populous town, where people gather together a crowd

of individuals unknown to each other, who never enter into

communication, and who are where they are, momentarily, either because

they expect to dance, or to hear music, or to show off the

magnificence of their dress. This is not what can ever be called a

_salon_. A _salon_ is an intimate and periodical meeting of

persons who for several years have been in the habit of frequenting

the same house, who enjoy each other's society, and who have some

reason, as they imagine, to be happy when they are brought in

contact. The persons who receive, form a link between the various

persons they invite, and this link binds the _habitués_ more

closely to one another, if, as is commonly the case, it is a woman of

superior mind who forms the point of union. A _salon_, to be

homogeneous, and to endure, requires that its _habitués_ should

have similar opinions and tastes, and, above all, enough of the

urbanity of bygone days to enable its frequenters to feel _at

home_ with every one in it, without the necessity of a formal

introduction. Formerly, this practice of speaking to persons you had

not been presented to was a proof of good-breeding; for it was well

known that in no house of any distinction would there be found a guest

who was not worthy to be the associate of whoever was noblest and

best. These habits of social intercourse gave a value to the

intellectual and moral qualities of the individual, quite independent

of his fortune or his rank; and in these little republics the real

sovereign was _merit_."

Madame Ancelot is right here, and there were in Paris several of these

_salons_, which served as the models for those of all the rest of

Europe. Under the Restoration, two illustrious ladies tried to recall

to the generation that had sprung from the Empire or from emigration

what the famous _salons_ of old had once been, and the Duchesse

de Duras and the Marquise de Montcalm (sister to the then minister,

the Duc de Richelieu) drew around them all that was in any way

distinguished in France. But the many causes we have noted above made

the enterprise a difficult one, and the various divergences of

society, politically speaking, rendered the task of the mistress of a

house one of surpassing arduousness. Mme. de Staël, who, by her very

superiority perhaps,--certainly by her vehemence,--was prevented from

ever being a perfect example of what was necessary in this respect,

acquired the nickname of _Présidente de Salons_; and it would

appear, that, with her resolute air, her loud voice, and her violent

opinions, she really did seem like a kind of speaker of some House of

Commons disguised as a woman. That the management of a _salon_

was no easy affair the following anecdote will prove. The Duchesse de

Duras one day asked M. de Talleyrand what he thought of the evening

_réunions_ at her house, and after a few words of praise, he

added: "But you are too vivacious as yet, too young. Ten years hence

you will know better how to manage it all." Mme. de Duras was then

somewhere about fifty-four or five! We perceive, therefore, that,

according to M. de Talleyrand, the proper manner of receiving a

certain circle of _habitués_ was likely to be the study of a

whole life.

We select from Mme. Ancelot's book sketches of the following

_maitresses de maison_, because they seem to us the types of the

periods of transformation to which they correspond in the order of

date:--Mme. Lebrun, Mme. Gérard, Mme. d'Abrantès, Mme. Récamier, Mme.

Nodier. Mme. Lebrun corresponds to the period when Pre-Revolutionary

traditions were still in force, and when the remembrance yet

subsisted of a society that had been a real and not a fictive

unity. Mme. Gérard--or we should rather say her husband, for she

occupied herself little with her guests, whom the illustrious painter

entertained--represents the period of the Empire, prolonging itself

into the Restoration, and seeking by the immunities of talent and

intelligence to bring the two _régimes_ to meet upon what might be

termed neutral ground. Mme. d'Abrantès is the type of that last

remnant of the half-heroic, half-sentimental epoch which tried to

endure even after the first days of 1830, and of which certain verses

of Delphine Gay, certain impossible portraits of invincible colonels,

certain parts played by the celebrated Elleviou, and the

Troubadourish "_Partant pour la Syrie_" of Queen Hortense, are

emblematical. Mme. Récamier, although in date all but the contemporary

of Mme. Lebrun, is, in her position of mistress of a _salon_,

essentially the impersonation of a foible peculiar to the present day;

she typifies the class of women who, in Paris, are absolutely absorbed

by the thought of their _salons_, for whom to receive is to live, and

who are ready to expire at the notion of any celebrity not being a

frequenter of their tea-table. Mme. Nodier's--and here, as with Mme.

Gérard, we must substitute the husband for the wife, and say Charles

Nodier's--_salon_ was the menagerie whither thronged all the strange

beings who, after the Revolution of July, fancied they had some

special and extraordinary "call" in the world of Art. Nodier's

receptions at the Arsenal represent the literary and artistic movement

of 1830.

To begin, then, with Mme. Lebrun. This lady was precisely one of

those individualities who, since the days of Louis XIV., had found it

easy to take their place in French society, who, under the ancien

_régime_, were the equals of the whole world, and who, since

"Equality" has been so formally decreed by the laws of the land, would

have found it impossible, under the Citizen King, Louis Philippe, or

under the so-called "Democratic Empire" of Louis Napoleon, to surround

themselves with any society save that of a perfectly inferior

description.

Mme. Lebrun was the daughter of a very second-rate painter of the name

of Vigée, the sister of a poet of some talent of the same name, and

was married young to a picture-dealer of large fortune and most

expensive and dissipated, not to say dissolute habits, M. Lebrun. She

was young,--and, like Mme. Récamier and a few others, remained

youthful to a very late term of her existence,--remarkably beautiful,

full of talent, grace, and _esprit_, and possessed of the magnificent

acquirements as a portrait-painter that have made her productions to

this day valuable throughout the galleries of Europe. She was very

soon so brilliantly in fashion, that there was not a _grand seigneur_

of the court, a _grande dame_ of the queen's intimacy, a rich

_fermier-général_, or a famous writer, artist, or _savant_, who did

not petition to be admitted to her soirées; and in her small

apartment, in the Rue de Cléry, were held probably the last of those

intimate and charmingly unceremonious réunions which so especially

characterized the manners of the high society of France when all

question of etiquette was set aside. The witty Prince de Ligne, the

handsome Comte de Vaudreuil, the clever M. de Boufflers, and his

step-son, M. de Sabran, with such men as Diderot, d'Alembert,

Marmontel, and Laharpe, were the original _habitués_ of Mme. Lebrun's

drawing-room. At the same time used to visit her the bitter, bilious,

discontented David, the painter, who, though very young, was annoyed

at a woman having such incontestable proficiency in his own art, and

whose democratic ideas were hurt at her receiving such a number of

what he styled "great people." Madame Lebrun, one day,--little

dreaming that she was addressing a future _coupe-tête_ of the most

violent species, (perhaps the only genuine admirer of Marat,)--said,

smilingly, to the future painter of _Les Sabines_, "David, you are

wretched because you are neither Duke nor Marquis. I, to whom all such

titles are absolutely indifferent, I receive with sincere pleasure all

who make themselves agreeable." The apostrophe apparently hit home,

for David never returned to Mme. Lebrun's house, and was no

well-wisher of hers in later times. But on this occasion she had not

only told the truth to an individual, she had touched upon the secret

sore of the nation and the time; and vast classes were already

brooding in silence over the absurd, vain, and empty regret at being

"neither Duke nor Marquis." The Revolution was at hand, and the days

rapidly approaching when all such pleasant assemblies as those held by

Mme. Lebrun would become forever impossible. At some of these, the

crowd of intimates, and of persons all acquainted with each other, was

so great, that the highest dignitaries of the realm had to content

themselves with sitting down upon the floor; and on one occasion, the

Maréchal de Noailles, who was of exceedingly large build, had to

request the assistance of several of his neighbors before he could be

brought from his squatting attitude to his feet again.

Mme. Lebrun emigrated, like the majority of her associates,--going to

Russia, to Italy, to Germany, to England, and everywhere increasing

the number of her friends, besides preserving all those of former

times, whom she sedulously sought out in their voluntary exile, and to

whom, in many cases, she even proved an invaluable friend. In the

commencement of the Restoration, Mme. Lebrun returned to France, and

established herself definitively at Paris, and at Louveciennes near

Marly, where she had a delightful summer residence. Here, as in her

salons in the metropolis, she tried to bring back the tone of French

society to what it had been before the Revolution, and to show the

younger generations what had been the gayety, the grace, the

affability, the exquisite good-breeding of those who had preceded

them. The men and women of her own standing seconded her, but the

younger ones were not to be drawn into high-heartedness; and an

observer might have had before him the somewhat strange spectacle of

old age gay, gentle, unobservant of any stiff formality, and of youth

preoccupied and grave, and, instead of being refined in manners,

pedantic. "The younger frequenters of Mme. Lebrun's salon," says

Mme. Ancelot, "were strangers to the world into which they found

themselves raised; those who surrounded them were of an anterior

civilization; they could not grow to be identified with a past which

was unknown to them, or known only through recitals that disfigured

it.... Amidst the remnants of a society that had been historical,

there was, as it were, the breath of a spirit born of our days; new

ideas, new opinions, new hopes, nay, even new recollections, were

evident all around, and served to render social unity impossible; but,

above all, what failed in this one particular centre was youth,--there

were few or no young people." This was perfectly true; and

Mme. Lebrun's _salon_ is interesting only from the fact of its

being the last, perhaps, in which French people of our day can have

acquired a complete notion of what the Pre-Revolutionary _salons_

of France were.

The evening _réunions_ at the house of Gérard, the celebrated

painter, were among the most famous features of the society of the

Restoration. The gatherings at Mmes. de Duras's and de Montcalm's

splendid hotels were all but exclusively political and diplomatic;

whereas at Gérard's there was a mixture of these with the purely

mundane and artistic elements, and, above all, there was a portion of

Imperialist fame blended with all the rest, that was hard to be found

anywhere else. Gérard, too, had painted the portraits of so many

crowned heads, and been so much admitted into the intimacy of his

royal models, that, whenever a foreigner of any note visited Paris, he

almost immediately asked to be put in a way to be invited to the

celebrated artist's Wednesday receptions. This was, to a certain

degree, an innovation in regular French society; the French being most

truly, as has been said, the "Chinese of Europe," and liking nothing

less than the intermixture with themselves of anything foreign. But

Gérard was one of those essentially superior men who are able to

influence those around them, and bring them to much whereto no one

else could have persuaded them. Gérard, like many celebrated persons,

was infinitely superior to what he _did_. As far as what he

_did_ was concerned, Gérard, though a painter of great merit, was

far inferior to two or three of whom France has since been justly

proud; but in regard to what he _was_, Gérard was a man of

genius, who had in many ways few superiors. Few men, even in France,

have so highly deserved the reputation of _un homme d'esprit_. He

was as _spirituel_ as Talleyrand himself, and almost as

clear-sighted and profound. Add to this that nothing could surpass the

impression made by Gérard at first sight. He was strikingly like the

first Napoleon, but handsomer; with the same purity of outline, the

same dazzlingly lustrous eyes, full of penetration and thought, but

with a certain _sympathetic_ charm about his whole person that

the glorious conqueror of Marengo and Dictator of Gaul never

possessed.

Gérard was not entirely French; born in Rome in 1770, his father only

was a native of France, his mother was an Italian; and from her he

inherited a certain combination of qualities and peculiarities that at

once distinguished him from the majority of his countrymen. Full of

poetic fire and inspiration, there was in Gérard at the same time a

strong critical propensity, that showed itself in his caustic wit and,

sometimes, not unmalicious remarks. There was also a perpetual

struggle in his character between reflection and the first impulse,

and sometimes the _étourderie_ of the French nature was suddenly

checked by the caution of the Italian; but, take him as he was, he was

a man in a thousand, and those who were in the habit of constantly

frequenting his house affirm loudly and with the deepest regret, that

they shall never "look upon his like again."

Gérard had built for himself a house in the Rue des Augustins, near

the ancient church of St. Germain des Près; and there, every Wednesday

evening, summer and winter, he received whatever was in any way

illustrious in France, or whatever the other capitals of Europe sent

to Paris, _en passant_. "Four small rooms," says Mme. Ancelot,

"and a very small antechamber, composed the whole apartment. At twelve

o'clock tea was served, with eternally the same cakes, over which a

pupil of Gérard's, Mlle. Godefroy, presided. Gérard himself talked;

his wife remained nailed to a whist-table, attending to nothing and to

nobody. Evening once closed in, cards were the only occupation of

Mme. Gérard."

From Mme. de Staël down to Mlle. Mars, from Talleyrand and Pozzo di

Borgo down to M. Thiers, there were no celebrities, male or female,

that, during thirty years, (from 1805 to 1835,) did not flock to

Gérard's house, and all, how different soever might be their character

or position, agreed in the same opinion of their host; and those who

survive say of him to this day,--"Nothing in his _salons_

announced that you were received by a great _Artist_, but before

half an hour had elapsed you felt you were the guest of a

distinguished Man; you had seen by a glance at Gérard's whole person

and air that he was something apart from others,--that the sacred fire

burned there!"

The regret felt for Gérard's loss by all who ever knew him is not to

be told, and speaks as highly for those who cherished as for him who

inspired it. His, again, was one of the _salons_ (impossible now

in France) where genius and social superiority, whether of birth or

position, met together on equal terms. Without having, perhaps, as

large a proportion of the old _noblesse de cour_ at his house as

had Mme. Lebrun, Gérard received full as many of those eminent

personages whose political occupations would have seemed to estrange

them from the world of mixed society and the Arts. This is a

_nuance_ to be observed. Under the Empire, hard and despotic as

was the rule of Bonaparte, and anxious even as he was to draw round

him all the aristocratic names that would consent to serve his

government, there was--owing to the mere force of events and the

elective origin of the throne--a strong and necessary democratic

feeling, that assigned importance to each man according to his

works. Besides this, let it be well observed, the first Empire had a

strong tendency to protect and exalt the Arts, from its own very

ardent desire to be made glorious in the eyes of posterity. Napoleon

I. was, in his way, a consummate artist, a prodigiously intelligent

_metteur en scène_ of his own exploits, and he valued full as

much the man who delineated or sang his deeds, as the minister who

helped him to legislate, or the diplomatist who drew up protocols and

treaties. The Emperor was a lover of noise and show, and his time was

a showy and a noisy one. Bonaparte had, in this respect, little enough

of the genuine Tyrant nature. Unlike his nephew, he loved neither

silence nor darkness; he loved the reflection of his form in the broad

noon of publicity, and the echo of his tread upon the sounding soil of

popular renown. Could he have been sure that all free men would have

united their voices in chanting his exploits, he would have made the

citizens of France the freest in the whole world. Compression with him

was either a mere preventive against or vengeance for detraction.

Now this publicity-loving nature was, we repeat, as much served by Art

and artists as by politicians; nay, perhaps more; and for this reason

artists stood high during the period of the Empire. Talma held a

social rank that under no other circumstances could have been his, and

a painter like Gérard could welcome to his house statesmen such as

Talleyrand or Daru, or marshals of France, and princes even. We shall

show, by-and-by, how this grew to be impossible later. At present we

will recur to Mme. Ancelot for a really very true description of two

persons who were among the _habitués_ of the closing years of

Gérard's weekly receptions, and one of whom was destined to universal

celebrity: we allude to Mme. Gay, and her daughter, Delphine,--later,

Mme. Girardin. Of these two, the mother, famous as Sophie Gay, was as

thorough a remnant of the exaggerations and bad taste of the Empire as

were the straight, stiff, mock-classical articles of furniture of the

Imperialist hotels, or the _or-moulu_ clocks so ridiculed by

Balzac, on which turbaned Mamelukes mourned their expiring steeds. All

the false-heroics of the literature of the Empire found their

representative (their last one, perhaps) in Mme. Sophie Gay, and it

has not been sufficiently remarked that she even transmitted a shade

of all this to her daughter, in other respects one of the most

sagacious spirits and one of the most essentially unconventional of

our own day. A certain something that was not in harmony with the tone

of contemporary writers here and there surprised you in Delphine de

Girardin's productions, and, as Jules Janin once said, "One would

think the variegated plumes of Murat's fantastic hat[2] were sweeping

through her brains!" This was her mother's doing. Delphine, who had

never lived during one hour of the glory of the Empire, had, through

the medium of her mother, acquired a slight tinge of its

_boursouflure_; and had it not been for her own personal good

taste, she would have been misled precisely by her strong lyrical

aptitudes. Madame Gay found in Gérard's _salon_ all the people

she had best known in her youth, and she was delighted to have her

early years recalled to her. Mme. Ancelot, who, like many of her

country women, felt a marked antipathy for Madame Gay, has given a

very true portrait of both mother and daughter.

"Many years after," she writes, "when these ladies were (through M. de

Girardin) at the head of one of the chief organs of the Paris press,

they were much flattered and courted; at the period I speak of" (about

1817-1825) "their position was far from brilliant, and Mme. Gay was

far from popular. Every word that fell from her mouth, uttered in a

sharp tone, and full of bitterness and envy, went to speak ill of

others and prodigiously well of herself. She had a mania for titles

and tuft-hunting, and could speak of no one under a marquis, a count,

or a baron. Her daughter's beauty and talents caused her afterwards to

be more generally admitted into society; but at this period she was

avoided by most people."

Her daughter's beauty was certainly marvellous, and when, under the

reign of Louis Philippe, American society had in Paris more than one

brilliant representative and more than one splendid centre of

hospitality, where all that was illustrious in the society of France

perpetually flocked, we make no doubt many of our countrymen noticed,

whether at theatre or concert or ball, the really queenlike air of

Mme. de Girardin, and the exquisitely classic profile, which,

enframed, as it were, by the capricious spirals of the lightest,

fairest flaxen hair, resembled the outline of some antique statue of a

Muse.

Delphine Gay and her mother were more the ornaments of the

_salon_ of the Duchesse d'Abrantès, perhaps, than of that of

Gérard; and as the former continued open long after the latter was

closed by death, not only the young girl, whose verses were so

immensely in fashion during the Restoration, was one of the constant

guests of Junot's widow, but she continued to be so as the wife of

Émile de Girardin, the intelligent and enterprising founder of the

newspaper "La Presse."

The _salon_ of the Duchesse d'Abrantès was one of the first of a

species which has since then found imitators by scores and hundreds

throughout France. It was the _salon_ of a person not in herself

sufficiently superior or even celebrated to attract the genuine

superiorities of the country without the accessory attractions of

luxury, and not sufficiently wealthy to draw around her by her

splendid style of receiving, and to disdain the bait held out to those

she invited by the presence of great "lions." Gérard gave to his

guests, at twelve o'clock at night, a cup of tea and "eternally the

same cakes" all the year round; but Gérard was the type of the great

honors rendered, as we have observed, to Art under the Empire, and to

his house men went as equals, whose daily occupations made them the

associates of kings. This was not the case with the Duchesse

d'Abrantès. She had notoriety, not fame. Her "Mémoires" had been read

all through Europe, but it is to be questioned whether anything beyond

curiosity was satisfied by the book, and it certainly brought to its

author little or none of that which in France stands in lieu even of

fortune, but which is not easy to obtain, namely,--_consideration_.

The Duchesse d'Abrantès was rather popular than otherwise; she was

even beloved by a certain number of persons; but she never was what is

termed _considérée_,--and this gave to her _salon_ a different aspect

from that of the others we have spoken of. A dozen names could be

mentioned, whose wearers, without any means of "entertaining" their

friends, or giving them more than a glass of _eau sucrée_, were yet

surrounded by everything highest and best in the land, simply because

they were _gens considérables_, as the phrase went; but

Mme. d'Abrantès, who more or less received all that mixed population

known by the name of _tout Paris_, never was, we repeat, _considérée_.

The way in which Mme. Ancelot introduces her "friend," the poor

Duchesse d'Abrantès, on the scene, is exceedingly amusing and natural;

and we have here at once the opportunity of applying the remark we

made in commencing these pages, upon Mme. Ancelot's truthfulness. She

is the _habituée_ of the house of Mme. d'Abrantès; she professes

herself attached to the Duchess; yet she does not scruple to tell

everything as it really is, nor, out of any of the usual little

weaknesses of friendship, does she omit any one single detail that

proves the strange and indeed somewhat "Bohemian" manner of life of

her patroness. We, the readers of her book, are obviously obliged to

her for her indiscretions; with those who object to them from other

motives we have nothing to do.

Here, then, is the fashion in which we are introduced to Mme. la

Duchesse d'Abrantès, widow of Marshal Junot, and a born descendant of

the Comneni, Emperors of Byzantium.

Mme. Ancelot is sitting quietly by her fireside, one evening in

October, (some short time after the establishment of the monarchy of

July,) waiting to hear the result of a representation at the Théâtre

Français, where a piece of her own is for the first time being

performed. All at once, she hears several carriages stop at her door,

a number of persons rush up the stairs, and she finds herself in the

arms of the Duchesse d'Abrantès, who was resolved, as she says, to be

the first to congratulate her on her success. The hour is a late one;

supper is served, and conversation is prolonged into the "small

hours." All at once Mme. d'Abrantès exclaims, with an explosion of

delight,--"Ah! what a charming time is the night! one is so

deliciously off for talking! so safe! so secure! safe from bores and

from duns!" (_on ne craint ni les ennuyeux ni les créanciers_.')

Madame Ancelot affirms that this speech made a tremendous effect, and

that her guests looked at each other in astonishment. If this really

was the case, we can only observe that it speaks well for the

Parisians of the epoch at which it occurred; for, assuredly, at the

present day, no announcement of the kind would astonish or scandalize

any one. People in "good society," nowadays, in France, have got into

a habit of living from hand to mouth, and of living by expedients,

simply because they have not the strength of mind to live _out_

of society, and because the life of "the world" forces them to

expenses utterly beyond what they have any means of providing

for. However, we are inclined to believe that some five-and-twenty

years ago this was in no degree a general case, and that Mme.

d'Abrantès might perfectly well have been the first _maitresse de

maison_ to whom it happened.

"Alas!" sighs Mme. Ancelot, commenting upon her excellent friend's

strange confidence,--"it was the secret of her whole life that she

thus revealed to us in a moment of _abandon_,--the secret of an

existence that tried still to reflect the splendors of the Imperial

epoch, and that was at the same time perplexed and tormented by all

the thousand small miseries of pecuniary embarrassment. There were the

two extremes of a life that to the end excited my surprise. Grandeur!

want!--between those two opposites oscillated every day of the last

years of the Duchesse d'Abrantès; the exterior and visible portion of

that life arranged itself well or ill, as it best could, in the

middle,--now apparently colored by splendor, and now degraded by

distress; but at bottom the existence was unvaryingly what I state."

Madame d'Abrantès, at the period of her greatest notoriety, occupied

the ground-floor of a hotel in the Rue Rochechouart, with a garden,

where dancing was often introduced upon the lawn. Some remnants of

the glories of Imperialism were collected there, but the principal

_habitués_ were men of letters, artists, and young men who danced

well! (_les jeunes beaux qui dansaient bien!_) That one phrase

characterizes at once the ex-_belle_ of the Empire, the

contemporary of the sentimental Hortense de Beauharnais, and of the

more than _légère_ Pauline Borghése.

To the "new society of July" Mme. d'Abrantès was an object of great

curiosity. "I dote on seeing that woman!" said Balzac, one evening,

to Mme. Ancelot. "Only fancy! she saw Napoleon Bonaparte as a mere

boy,--knew him well,--knew him as a young man, unknown,--saw him

occupied, like anybody else, with the ordinary occurrences of

every-day life; then she saw him grow, and grow, and rise, and throw

the shadow of his name over the world. She seems to me somewhat like a

canonized creature who should all at once come and recount to me the

glories of paradise."

Balzac, it must be premised, was bitten just at this period by the

Napoleon mania, and this transformed his inquisitive attachment for

Mme. d'Abrantès into a kind of passion. It was at this period that he

chose to set up in his habitation in the Rue Cassini a sort of altar,

on which he placed a small statue of the Emperor, with these words

engraved upon the pedestal:--

"Ce qu'il avait commencé par l'épée,

Je l'achèverai par la plume!"

What particular part of the Imperial work this was that Balzac was to

"complete by the pen" was never rightly discovered,--but for a time he

had a sun-stroke for Napoleon, and his attachment for Mme. d'Abrantès

partook of this influence.

One anecdote told by Mme. Ancelot proves to what a degree the union of

"grandeur" and "want" she has alluded to went. "Mme. d'Abrantès," says

her biographer of the moment, "was always absorbed by the present

impression, whatever that might happen to be; she passed from joy to

despair like a child, and I never knew any house that was either so

melancholy or so gay." One evening, however, it would seem that the

Hôtel d'Abrantès was gayer than usual. Laughter rang loud through the

rooms, the company was numerous, and the mistress of the house in

unparalleled high spirits. If the tide of conversation seemed to

slacken, quickly Madame la Duchesse had some inimitable story of the

_ridicules_ of the ladies of the Imperial court, and the whole

circle was soon convulsed at her stories, and at her way of telling

them. The tea-table was forgotten. Generally, tea at her house was

taken at eleven o'clock; but on this occasion, midnight was long past

before it was announced, and before her guests assembled round the

table. If our readers are curious to know why, here was the reason:

All that remained of the plate had that very morning been put in pawn,

and when tea should have been served it was found that tea-spoons were

wanting! Whilst these were being sent for to the house of a friend

who lent them, Madame la Duchesse took charge of her guests, and

drowned their impatience in their hilarity.

It must be allowed that this lady was worthy to be the mother of the

young man who, one day, pointing to a sheet of stamped paper, on which

a bill of exchange might be drawn, said: "You see that; it is worth

five sous now; but if I sign my name to it, it will be worth nothing!"

This was a speech made by Junot's eldest son, known in Paris as the

Duc d'Abrantès, and as the intimate friend of Victor Hugo, from whom

at one time he was almost inseparable.

The eccentric personage we have just spoken of--the Duchesse

d'Abrantès--died in the year 1838, in a garret, upon a truckle-bed,

provided for her by the charity of a friend. The royal family paid the

expenses of her funeral, and Chateaubriand, accompanied by nearly

every celebrity of the literary world, followed on foot behind her

coffin, from the church to the burying-ground.

Madame d'Abrantès may be considered as the inventor, in France, of

what has since become so widely spread under the name of _les salons

picaresques_, and of what, at the present day, is famous under the

appellation of the _demi-monde_. Her example has been followed

by numberless imitators, and now, instead of presuming (as was the

habit formerly) that those only receive who are rich enough to do so,

it is constantly inquired, when any one in Paris opens his or her

house, whether he or she is ruined, and whether the _soirées_

given are meant merely to throw dust into people's eyes. The history

of the tea-spoons--so singular at the moment of its occurrence--has

since been parodied a hundred times over, and sometimes by mistresses

of houses whose fortune was supposed to put them far above all such

expedients. Madame d'Abrantès, we again say, was the founder of a

_genre_ in Paris society, and as such is well worth studying. The

_genre_ is by no means the most honorable, but it is one too

frequently found now in the social centres of the French capital for

the essayist on Paris _salons_ to pass it over unnoticed.

The _salon_ of Mme. Récamier is one of a totally different order,

and the world-wide renown of which may make it interesting to the

reader of whatever country. As far as age was concerned, Mme.

Récamier was the contemporary of Mme. d'Abrantès, of Gérard, nay,

almost of Mme. Lebrun; for the renown of her beauty dates from the

time of the French Revolution, and her early friendships associate her

with persons who even had time to die out under the first Empire; but

the _salon_ of Madame Récamier was among the exclusively modern

ones, and enjoyed all its lustre and its influence only after

1830. The cause of this is obvious: the circumstance that attracted

society to Mme. Récamier's house was no other than the certainty of

finding there M. de Chateaubriand. He was the divinity of the temple,

and the votaries flocked around his shrine. Before 1830 the temple had

been elsewhere, and, until her death, Mme. la Duchesse de Duras was

the high-priestess of the sanctuary, where a few privileged mortals

only were admitted to bow down before the idol. It is inconceivable

how easy a certain degree of renown finds it in Paris to establish one

of these undisputed sovereignties, before which the most important,

highest, most considerable individualities abdicate their own merit,

and prostrate themselves in the dust. M. de Chateaubriand in no way

justified the kind of worship that was paid him, nor did he even

obtain it so long as he was in a way actively to justify it. It was

when he grew old and produced nothing, and was hourly more and more

rusted over by selfishness, churlishness, and an exorbitant adoration

of his own genius, that the society of his country fell down upon its

knees before him, and was ready to make any sacrifice to insure to

itself the honor of one of his smiles or one of his looks. In this

disposition, Madame Récamier speedily obtained a leading influence

over Paris society, and when it was notorious that from four to six

every day the "Divinity" would be visible in her _salons_, her

_salons_ became the place of pilgrimage for all Paris. As with

those of Mme. d'Abrantès, there was a certain mixture amongst the

guests, because, without that, the _notoriety_, which neither

Chateaubriand nor Mme. Récamier disliked, would have been less easily

secured; but the tone of the _réunions_ was vastly different, and

at the celebrated receptions of the Abbaye aux Bois (where

Mme. Récamier spent her last quarter of a century) the somewhat

austere deportment of the _siècle de Louis XIV._ was in

vogue. All the amusements were in their nature grave. Mlle. Rachel

recited a scene from "Polyeucte" for the author of "Les Martyrs," and

for archbishops and cardinals; the Duc de Noailles read a chapter from

his history of Mme. de Maintenon; some performance of strictly

classical music was to be heard; or, upon state occasions,

Chateaubriand himself vouchsafed to impart to a chosen few a few pages

of the "Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe."

In her youth Mme. Récamier had been reputed beautiful, and her sole

occupation then was to do the honors of her beauty. She did not dream

of ever being anything else; and as she remained young marvellously

long,--as her beauty, or the charm, whatever it was, that

distinguished her, endured until a very late epoch of her life,--she

was far advanced in years before the idea of becoming famous through

any other medium save that of her exterior advantages ever struck

her. Madame Récamier had no intellectual superiority, but,

paraphrasing in action Molière's witty sentence, that "silence, well

employed, may go far to establish a man's capacity," she resolved to

employ well the talent she possessed of making other people believe

themselves clever. Mme. Ancelot, whose "good friend" she is supposed

to have been, and who treats her with the same sincerity she applies

to Mme. d'Abrantès, has a very ingenious and, we have reason to fancy,

a very true parallel, for Mme. Récamier. She compares her to the

mendicant described by Sterne, (or Swift,) who always obtained alms

even from those who never gave to any other, and whose secret lay in

the adroit flatteries with which he seasoned all his beggings. The

best passages in Mme. Ancelot's whole Volume are those where she

paints Mme. Récamier, and we will therefore quote them.

"The Recluse of the Abbaye aux Bois," she says, "had either read the

story of the beggar, or her instinct had persuaded her that vanity and

pride are the surest vulnerable points by which to attack and subject

the human heart. From the first to the last of all the orators,

writers, artists, or celebrities of no matter what species, that were

invited to Mme. Récamier's house, _all_ heard from her lips the

same admiring phrases, the first time they were presented to her. With

a trembling voice she used to say: 'The emotion I feel in the presence

of a superior being does not permit me to express, as I should wish to

do, all my admiration, all my sympathy;--but you can divine,--you can

understand;--my emotion tells the rest!' This eulogistic sentence, a

well-studied hesitation, words interrupted, and looks of the most

perfect enthusiasm, produced in the person thus received a far more

genuine emotion than that with which he was met. It was no other than

the artifice of wholesale, universal flattery,--always and invariably

the same,--with which Mme. Récamier achieved her greatest conquests,

and continued to draw around her almost all the eminent men of our

epoch. All this was murmured in soft, low tones, so that he only to

whom she spoke tasted the honey poured into his ear. Her grace of

manner all the while was infinite; for though she had no talent for

conversation, she had, in the highest degree, the ability which

enables one to succeed in certain little combinations, and when she

had determined that such or such a great man should become her

_habitué_, the web she spun round him on all sides was composed

of threads so imperceptibly fine and so innumerable, that those who

escaped were few, and gifted with marvellous address."

Mme. Ancelot confesses to having "studied narrowly" all

Mme. Récamier's manoeuvres, and to having watched all the thousand

little traps she laid for social "lions"; but we are rather astonished

herein at Mme. Ancelot's astonishment, for, with more or less talent

and grace, these are the devices resorted to in Paris by a whole class

of _maitresses de maison_, of whom Mme. Récamier is simply the

most perfect type.

But the most amusing part of all, and one that will be above all

highly relished by any one who has ever seen the same game carried on,

is the account of Mme. Récamier's campaign against M. Guizot, which

signally failed, all her small webs having been coldly brushed away by

the intensely vainglorious individual who knew he should not be placed

above Chateaubriand, and who would for no consideration under heaven

have been placed beneath him. The spectacle of this small and delicate

vanity doing battle against this vanity so infinitely hard and robust

is exquisitely diverting. Mme. Récamier put herself so prodigiously

out of her way; she who was indolent became active; she who was

utterly insensible to children became maternal; she who was of

delicate health underwent what only a vigorous constitution would

undertake. But all in vain; she either did not or would not see that

M. Guizot would not be _second_ where M. de Chateaubriand was

_first_. Besides, she split against another rock, that she had

either chosen to overlook, or the importance of which she had

undervalued. If Mme. Récamier had for the idol of her shrine at the

Abbaye aux Bois M. de Chateaubriand, M. Guizot had also _his_

Madame Récamier, the "Egeria" of the Hôtel Talleyrand,--the Princess

Lieven. The latter would have resisted to the death any attempt to

carry off "her Minister" from the _salons_ where his presence was

the "attraction" reckoned upon daily, nay, almost hourly; and against

such a rival as the venerable Princess Lieven, Mme. Récamier, spite of

all her arts and wiles, had no possible chance. However, she left

nothing untried, and when M. Guizot took a villa at Auteuil, whither

to repair of an evening and breathe the freshness of the half-country

air after the stormy debates of the Chambers, she also established

herself close by, and opened her attack on the enemy's outposts by a

request to be allowed to walk in the Minister's grounds, her own

garden being ridiculously small! This was followed by no end of

attentions directed towards Mme. de Meulan, M. Guizot's sister-in-law,

who saw through the whole, and laughed over it with her friends; no

end of little dancing _matinées_ were got up for the Minister's

young daughters, and no end even of sweet biscuits were perpetually

provided for a certain lapdog belonging to the family! All in vain!

We may judge, too, what transports of enthusiasm were enacted when the

Minister himself was _by chance (!)_ encountered in the alleys of

the park, and with what outpourings of admiration he was greeted, by

the very person who, of all others, was so anxious to become one of

his votaries. But, as we again repeat, it was of no use. M. Guizot

never consented to be one of the _habitués_ of the _salon_

of the Abbaye aux Bois. It should be remarked, also, that M. Guizot

cared little for anything out of the immediate sphere of politics, and

of the politics of the moment; he took small interest in what went on

in Art, and none whatever in what went on in the so-called "world"; so

that where a _salon_ was not predominantly political, there was

small chance of presenting Louis Philippe's Prime-Minister with any

real attraction. For this reason he was now and then to be met at the

house of Mme. de Châtenay, often at that of Mme. de Boigne, but

_never_ in any of the receptions of the ordinary run of men and

women of the world. _His own salon_, we again say,--the

_salon_ where he was what Chateaubriand was at the Abbaye aux

Bois,--was the _salon_ of the Princess Lieven; and to have ever

thought she could induce M. Guizot to be in the slightest degree

faithless to this _habit_ argues, on the part of Mme. Récamier,

either a vanity more egregious than we had even supposed, or an

ignorance of what she had to combat that seems impossible. To have

imagined for a moment that she could induce M. Guizot to frequent her

_réunions_ shows that she appreciated neither Mme. de Lieven, nor

M. Guizot, nor, we may say, herself, in the light of the

high-priestess of Chateaubriand's temple.

However, what Mme. Récamier went through with regard to the arrogant

Président du Conseil of the Orléans dynasty, more than one of her

imitators are at this hour enduring for some "lion" infinitely

illustrious. This kind of hunt after celebrated persons is a feature

of French civilization, and a feature peculiarly characteristic of the

French women who take a pride in their receptions. A genuine

_maitresse de maison_ in Paris has no affections, no ties, save

those of her _salon_. She is wholly absorbed in thinking how she

shall render this more attractive than the _salon_ of some other

lady, who is her intimate friend, but whose sudden disappearance from

the social scene, by any catastrophe, death even, would not leave her

inconsolable. She has neither husband, children, relatives, nor

friends (in the genuine acceptation of the word);--she has, above all,

before all, always and invariably, her _salon_. This race of

women, who date undoubtedly from the famous Marquise de Rambouillet in

the time of the Fronde, are now dying out, and are infinitely less

numerous than they were even twenty years ago in Paris; but a few of

them still exist, and in these few the ardor we allude to, and which

would lead them, following in Mme. Récamier's track, to embark for the

North Cape in search of some great celebrity, is in no degree

abated. Madame Récamier is curious as the arch-type of this race, so

purely, thoroughly, exclusively Parisian.

Perhaps to a foreigner, however, no _salon_ was more amusing than

that of Charles Nodier; but this was of an utterly different

description, and all but strictly confined to the world of Literature

and Art. Nodier himself occupied a prominent place in the literature

that was so much talked of during the last years of the Restoration

and the first years of the Monarchy of July, and his house was the

rendezvous for all the combatants of both sides, who at that period

were engaged in the famous Classico-Romantic struggle. Nodier was the

Head Librarian of the Arsenal, and it was in the _salons_ of this

historic palace that he held his weekly gatherings. He himself was

scarcely to be reputed exclusively of either party; he enjoyed the

favors of the Monarchy, and the sympathies of the Opposition; the

"Classics" elected him a member of the Académie Française, and the

"Romantics" were perpetually in his intimacy. The fact was, that

Nodier at heart believed in neither Classics nor Romantics, laughed at

both in his sleeve, and only cared to procure to himself the most

agreeable house, the greatest number of comforts, and the largest sums

of money possible.

"By degrees," says Mme. Ancelot, "as Nodier cared less for other

people, he praised them more, probably in order to compensate them in

words for the less he gave them in affection. Besides this, he was

resolved not to be disturbed in his own vanities, and for this he knew

there was one only way, which was to foster the vanities of everybody

else. Never did eulogium take such varied forms to laud and exalt the

most mediocre things. Nowhere were so many geniuses whom the public

never guessed at raised to the rank of _divinities_ as in the

_salons_ of Charles Nodier."

The description contained in the little volume before us, the manner

in which every petty scribbler of fiftieth-rate talent was transformed

into a giant in the society of Nodier, is extremely curious and

amusing, and the more so that it is strictly true, and tallies

perfectly with the recollections of the individuals who, at the period

mentioned, were admitted to the _réunions_ of the Arsenal.

Every form of praise having been expended upon persons of infinitely

small merit, what was to be done when those of real superiority

entered upon the scene? It was impossible to apply to them the forms

of laudation adapted to their inferiors. Well, then, a species of

slang was invented, by which it was thought practicable to make the

genuine great men conceive they had passed into the condition of

demigods. A language was devised that was to express the fervor of the

adorers who were suddenly allowed to penetrate into Olympus, and the

strange, misapplied terms whereof seemed to the uninitiated the

language of insanity. For instance, if, after a dozen little unshaved,

unkempt poetasters had been called "sublime," Victor Hugo vouchsafed

to recite one of his really best Odes, what was the eulogistic form to

be adopted? Mme. Ancelot will tell us.

"A pause would ensue, and at the end of a silence of some minutes,

when the echo of Hugo's sonorous voice had subsided, one after another

of the _elect_ would rise, go up to the poet, take his hand with

solemn emotion, and raise to the ceiling eyes full of mute enthusiasm.

The crowd of bystanders would listen all agape. Then, to the surprise,

almost to the consternation, of the uninitiated, one word only would

be spoken,--loudly, distinctly, and with strong, deep emphasis spoken;

that word would be:

"_Cathedral!!!_

"The first orator, after this effort, would return to the place whence

he had come, and another, succeeding to him, after repeating the same

pantomime as the former, would exclaim:

"_Ogive!!!_

"Then a third would come forward, and, after looking all around, would

risk the word:

"_Pyramid-of-Egypt!!!_

"And thereat the whole assembly would start off into frenzies of

applause, and fifty or sixty voices would repeat in chorus the

sacramental words that had just been pronounced separately."

The degree of absurdity to which a portion of society must have

attained before such scenes as the above could become possible may

serve as a commentary and an explanation to half the literature which

flooded the stage and the press in France for the first six or eight

years after the Revolution of 1830. However, to be just, we must, in

extenuation of all these absurdities, cite one passage more from

Mme. Ancelot's book, in which, in one respect, at all events, the

youth of twenty years ago in Paris are shown to have been superior to

the youth of the present day.

"Nodier's parties were extremely amusing," says our authoress; "his

charming daughter was the life of the whole; she drew around her young

girls of her own age; poets, musicians, painters, young and joyous as

these, were their partners in the dance, and every one was

full of hope and dreaming of glory. But what brought all the

light-heartedness, all the enthusiasm, all the exultation to its

utmost height was, that, in all that youth, so trusting and so

hopeful, _no one gave a single thought to money!_"

Assuredly, it would be impossible to say as much nowadays.

Taken as a whole, Mme. Ancelot's little volume is, as we said, an

amusing and an instructive one. It is not so from any portion of her

own individuality she has infused into it, but, on the contrary, from

the entire sincerity with which it mirrors other people. We recommend

it to our readers, for it is a record of Paris society in its

successive transformations from 1789 to 1848, and paints a class of

people and a situation of things, equally true types whereof may

possibly not be observable in future times.

Footnote 1: _Les Salons de Paris.--Foyers Eteints_. Par

Mme. Ancelot. 12mo. Paris.

Footnote 2: It will be remembered that on field-days Murat had

adopted a hat and feathers of a most ridiculous kind, and that have

become proverbial.

THE DISCOVERER OF THE NORTH CAPE.

A LEAF FROM KING ALFRED'S "OROSIUS."