sinking into the past. There existed
in that light and that shadow, a complete little new and old world,
comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was rubbing its eyes; nothing
resembles an awakening like a return; a group which regarded France
with ill-temper, and which France regarded with irony; good old owls
of marquises by the streetful, who had returned, and of ghosts, the
"former" subjects of amazement at everything, brave and noble gentlemen
who smiled at being in France but wept also, delighted to behold
their country once more, in despair at not finding their monarchy; the
nobility of the Crusades treating the nobility of the Empire, that is to
say, the nobility of the sword, with scorn; historic races who had
lost the sense of history; the sons of the companions of Charlemagne
disdaining the companions of Napoleon. The swords, as we have just
remarked, returned the insult; the sword of Fontenoy was laughable and
nothing but a scrap of rusty iron; the sword of Marengo was odious and
was only a sabre. Former days did not recognize Yesterday. People no
longer had the feeling for what was grand. There was some one who called
Bonaparte Scapin. This Society no longer exists. Nothing of it, we
repeat, exists to-day. When we select from it some one figure at random,
and attempt to make it live again in thought, it seems as strange to us
as the world before the Deluge. It is because it, too, as a matter of
fact, has been engulfed in a deluge. It has disappeared beneath two
Revolutions. What billows are ideas! How quickly they cover all that it
is their mission to destroy and to bury, and how promptly they create
frightful gulfs!

Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and candid times
when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire.

These salons had a literature and politics of their own. They believed
in Fievee. M. Agier laid down the law in them. They commentated M.
Colnet, the old bookseller and publicist of the Quay Malaquais. Napoleon
was to them thoroughly the Corsican Ogre. Later on the introduction into
history of M. le Marquis de Bonaparte, Lieutenant-General of the King's
armies, was a concession to the spirit of the age.

These salons did not long preserve their purity. Beginning with 1818,
doctrinarians began to spring up in them, a disturbing shade. Their way
was to be Royalists and to excuse themselves for being so. Where the
ultras were very proud, the doctrinarians were rather asham