quals of the whole world, and who, since
"Equality" has been so formally decreed by the laws of the land, would
have found it impossible, under the Citizen King, Louis Philippe, or
under the so-called "Democratic Empire" of Louis Napoleon, to surround
themselves with any society save that of a perfectly inferior
description.

Mme. Lebrun was the daughter of a very second-rate painter of the name
of Vigee, the sister of a poet of some talent of the same name, and
was married young to a picture-dealer of large fortune and most
expensive and dissipated, not to say dissolute habits, M. Lebrun. She
was young,--and, like Mme. Recamier and a few others, remained
youthful to a very late term of her existence,--remarkably beautiful,
full of talent, grace, and _esprit_, and possessed of the magnificent
acquirements as a portrait-painter that have made her productions to
this day valuable throughout the galleries of Europe. She was very
soon so brilliantly in fashion, that there was not a _grand seigneur_
of the court, a _grande dame_ of the queen's intimacy, a rich
_fermier-general_, or a famous writer, artist, or _savant_, who did
not petition to be admitted to her soirees; and in her small
apartment, in the Rue de Clery, were held probably the last of those
intimate and charmingly unceremonious reunions which so especially
characterized the manners of the high society of France when all
question of etiquette was set aside. The witty Prince de Ligne, the
handsome Comte de Vaudreuil, the clever M. de Boufflers, and his
step-son, M. de Sabran, with such men as Diderot, d'Alembert,
Marmontel, and Laharpe, were the original _habitues_ of Mme. Lebrun's
drawing-room. At the same time used to visit her the bitter, bilious,
discontented David, the painter, who, though very young, was annoyed
at a woman having such incontestable proficiency in his own art, and
whose democratic ideas were hurt at her receiving such a number of
what he styled "great people." Madame Lebrun, one day,--little
dreaming that she was addressing a future _coupe-tete_ of the most
violent species, (perhaps the only genuine admirer of Marat,)--said,
smilingly, to the future painter of _Les Sabines_, "David, you are
wretched because you are neither Duke nor Marquis. I, to whom all such
titles are absolutely indifferent, I receive with sincere pleasure all
who make themselves agreeable." The apostrophe apparently hit home,
for David never returned to Mme. Lebrun's ho