year of his reign, the emigrants were,
by rights, in the five and twentieth year of their adolescence.

All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly amounted
to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with the salons, seemed a papyrus.
There were some young people, but they were rather dead. The liveries in
the antechamber were antiquated. These utterly obsolete personages were
served by domestics of the same stamp.

They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and of obstinately
resisting the sepulchre. Nearly the whole dictionary consisted of
Conserver, Conservation, Conservateur; to be in good odor,--that was the
point. There are, in fact, aromatics in the opinions of these venerable
groups, and their ideas smelled of it. It was a mummified society. The
masters were embalmed, the servants were stuffed with straw.

A worthy old marquise, an emigree and ruined, who had but a solitary
maid, continued to say: "My people."

What did they do in Madame de T.'s salon? They were ultra.

To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not have
disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day. Let us
explain it.

To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of
the throne, and the mitre in the name of the attar; it is to ill-treat
the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is
to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received by
heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry;
it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to discover that the
Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the King is not sufficiently
royal, and that the night has too much light; it is to be discontented
with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of
whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming
their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.

The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase of the
Restoration.

Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which begins in
1814 and terminates about 1820, with the advent of M. de Villele,
the practical man of the Right. These six years were an extraordinary
moment; at one and the same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and
sombre, illuminated as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at
the same time, with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still
filled the horizon and were slowly