exclusive or so powerful (socially speaking) as under
Louis Philippe, and a tacit combat between envy and disdain was
carried on, such as perhaps no modern civilization ever witnessed. The
Faubourg St. Germain arrogated to itself the privilege of exclusively
representing _la societe Francaise_, and it must be confessed
that the behavior of its adversaries went far to substantiate its
claims.

Our purpose in these pages is not to touch upon anything connected
with politics, or we could show, that, whilst apparently severed from
all activity upon the more conspicuous field of the capital, the
ancient French families were employed in reestablishing their
influence in the rural provincial centres; the result of which was the
extraordinary influx of Legitimist members into the Chamber formed by
the first Republican elections in 1848. But this is foreign to our
present aim. As to what regards French _society_, properly so
called, it was, from 1804, after the proclamation of the Empire, till
1848, after the fall of Louis Philippe, in gradual but incessant
course of sub-division into separate cliques, each more or less
bitterly disposed towards the others. From the moment when this began
to be the case, the edifice of French society could no longer be
studied as a whole, and it only remained to examine its component
parts as evidences of the tendencies of various classes in the nation.
In this assuredly not uninteresting study, Mme. Ancelot's book is of
much service; for a certain number of the different _salons_ she
names are, as it were, types of the different stages civilization has
attained to in the city which chooses to style itself "the brain of
Europe."

The description, given in the little book before us, of what in Paris
constitutes a genuine _salon_, is a tolerably correct one. "A
_salon_," says Mme. Ancelot, "is not in the least like one of
those places in a populous town, where people gather together a crowd
of individuals unknown to each other, who never enter into
communication, and who are where they are, momentarily, either because
they expect to dance, or to hear music, or to show off the
magnificence of their dress. This is not what can ever be called a
_salon_. A _salon_ is an intimate and periodical meeting of
persons who for several years have been in the habit of frequenting
the same house, who enjoy each other's society, and who have some
reason, as they imagine, to be happy when they are brought in