." Mme. de Duras was then
somewhere about fifty-four or five! We perceive, therefore, that,
according to M. de Talleyrand, the proper manner of receiving a
certain circle of _habitues_ was likely to be the study of a
whole life.

We select from Mme. Ancelot's book sketches of the following
_maitresses de maison_, because they seem to us the types of the
periods of transformation to which they correspond in the order of
date:--Mme. Lebrun, Mme. Gerard, Mme. d'Abrantes, Mme. Recamier, Mme.
Nodier. Mme. Lebrun corresponds to the period when Pre-Revolutionary
traditions were still in force, and when the remembrance yet
subsisted of a society that had been a real and not a fictive
unity. Mme. Gerard--or we should rather say her husband, for she
occupied herself little with her guests, whom the illustrious painter
entertained--represents the period of the Empire, prolonging itself
into the Restoration, and seeking by the immunities of talent and
intelligence to bring the two _regimes_ to meet upon what might be
termed neutral ground. Mme. d'Abrantes is the type of that last
remnant of the half-heroic, half-sentimental epoch which tried to
endure even after the first days of 1830, and of which certain verses
of Delphine Gay, certain impossible portraits of invincible colonels,
certain parts played by the celebrated Elleviou, and the
Troubadourish "_Partant pour la Syrie_" of Queen Hortense, are
emblematical. Mme. Recamier, although in date all but the contemporary
of Mme. Lebrun, is, in her position of mistress of a _salon_,
essentially the impersonation of a foible peculiar to the present day;
she typifies the class of women who, in Paris, are absolutely absorbed
by the thought of their _salons_, for whom to receive is to live, and
who are ready to expire at the notion of any celebrity not being a
frequenter of their tea-table. Mme. Nodier's--and here, as with Mme.
Gerard, we must substitute the husband for the wife, and say Charles
Nodier's--_salon_ was the menagerie whither thronged all the strange
beings who, after the Revolution of July, fancied they had some
special and extraordinary "call" in the world of Art. Nodier's
receptions at the Arsenal represent the literary and artistic movement
of 1830.

To begin, then, with Mme. Lebrun. This lady was precisely one of
those individualities who, since the days of Louis XIV., had found it
easy to take their place in French society, who, under the ancien
_regime_, were the e