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 societe Francaise_, 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
_regime_, 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 fir