rious Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub, in ten manuscript
volumes, bound in red morocco and gilded on the edges. Madame de T. had
not published the memoirs, out of pride, and maintained herself on a
meagre income which had survived no one knew how.

Madame de T. lived far from the Court; "a very mixed society," as she
said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor. A few friends assembled
twice a week about her widowed hearth, and these constituted a purely
Royalist salon. They sipped tea there, and uttered groans or cries of
horror at the century, the charter, the Bonapartists, the prostitution
of the blue ribbon, or the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII., according as the
wind veered towards elegy or dithyrambs; and they spoke in low tones of
the hopes which were presented by Monsieur, afterwards Charles X.

The songs of the fishwomen, in which Napoleon was called Nicolas, were
received there with transports of joy. Duchesses, the most delicate and
charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over couplets like the
following, addressed to "the federates":--

Refoncez dans vos culottes[20]
Le bout d' chemis' qui vous pend.
Qu'on n' dis' pas qu' les patriotes
Ont arbore l' drapeau blanc?

There they amused themselves with puns which were considered terrible,
with innocent plays upon words which they supposed to be venomous, with
quatrains, with distiches even; thus, upon the Dessolles ministry, a
moderate cabinet, of which MM. Decazes and Deserre were members:--

Pour raffermir le trone ebranle sur sa base,[21]
Il faut changer de sol, et de serre et de case.

Or they drew up a list of the chamber of peers, "an abominably Jacobin
chamber," and from this list they combined alliances of names, in such
a manner as to form, for example, phrases like the following: Damas.
Sabran. Gouvion-Saint-Cyr.--All this was done merrily. In that society,
they parodied the Revolution. They used I know not what desires to give
point to the same wrath in inverse sense. They sang their little Ca
ira:--

Ah! ca ira ca ira ca ira!
Les Bonapartistes a la lanterne!

Songs are like the guillotine; they chop away indifferently, to-day this
head, to-morrow that. It is only a variation.

In the Fualdes affair, which belongs to this epoch, 1816, they took
part for Bastide and Jausion, because Fualdes was "a Buonapartist." They
designated t