hat he viewed everything through their medium.
It was he who said: "The Cardinals are the peers of France of Rome;
the lords are the peers of France of England." Moreover, as it is
indispensable that the Revolution should be everywhere in this century,
this feudal salon was, as we have said, dominated by a bourgeois. M.
Gillenormand reigned there.

There lay the essence and quintessence of the Parisian white society.
There reputations, even Royalist reputations, were held in quarantine.
There is always a trace of anarchy in renown. Chateaubriand, had he
entered there, would have produced the effect of Pere Duchene. Some of
the scoffed-at did, nevertheless, penetrate thither on sufferance. Comte
Beug*** was received there, subject to correction.

The "noble" salons of the present day no longer resemble those salons.
The Faubourg Saint-Germain reeks of the fagot even now. The Royalists of
to-day are demagogues, let us record it to their credit.

At Madame de T.'s the society was superior, taste was exquisite and
haughty, under the cover of a great show of politeness. Manners there
admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements which were the old
regime itself, buried but still alive. Some of these habits, especially
in the matter of language, seem eccentric. Persons but superficially
acquainted with them would have taken for provincial that which was only
antique. A woman was called Madame la Generale. Madame la Colonelle was
not entirely disused. The charming Madame de Leon, in memory, no
doubt, of the Duchesses de Longueville and de Chevreuse, preferred this
appellation to her title of Princesse. The Marquise de Crequy was also
called Madame la Colonelle.

It was this little high society which invented at the Tuileries the
refinement of speaking to the King in private as the King, in the third
person, and never as Your Majesty, the designation of Your Majesty
having been "soiled by the usurper."

Men and deeds were brought to judgment there. They jeered at the age,
which released them from the necessity of understanding it. They abetted
each other in amazement. They communicated to each other that modicum
of light which they possessed. Methuselah bestowed information on
Epimenides. The deaf man made the blind man acquainted with the course
of things. They declared that the time which had elasped since Coblentz
had not existed. In the same manner that Louis XVIII. was by the grace
of God, in the five and twentieth