use, and was no
well-wisher of hers in later times. But on this occasion she had not
only told the truth to an individual, she had touched upon the secret
sore of the nation and the time; and vast classes were already
brooding in silence over the absurd, vain, and empty regret at being
"neither Duke nor Marquis." The Revolution was at hand, and the days
rapidly approaching when all such pleasant assemblies as those held by
Mme. Lebrun would become forever impossible. At some of these, the
crowd of intimates, and of persons all acquainted with each other, was
so great, that the highest dignitaries of the realm had to content
themselves with sitting down upon the floor; and on one occasion, the
Marechal de Noailles, who was of exceedingly large build, had to
request the assistance of several of his neighbors before he could be
brought from his squatting attitude to his feet again.

Mme. Lebrun emigrated, like the majority of her associates,--going to
Russia, to Italy, to Germany, to England, and everywhere increasing
the number of her friends, besides preserving all those of former
times, whom she sedulously sought out in their voluntary exile, and to
whom, in many cases, she even proved an invaluable friend. In the
commencement of the Restoration, Mme. Lebrun returned to France, and
established herself definitively at Paris, and at Louveciennes near
Marly, where she had a delightful summer residence. Here, as in her
salons in the metropolis, she tried to bring back the tone of French
society to what it had been before the Revolution, and to show the
younger generations what had been the gayety, the grace, the
affability, the exquisite good-breeding of those who had preceded
them. The men and women of her own standing seconded her, but the
younger ones were not to be drawn into high-heartedness; and an
observer might have had before him the somewhat strange spectacle of
old age gay, gentle, unobservant of any stiff formality, and of youth
preoccupied and grave, and, instead of being refined in manners,
pedantic. "The younger frequenters of Mme. Lebrun's salon," says
Mme. Ancelot, "were strangers to the world into which they found
themselves raised; those who surrounded them were of an anterior
civilization; they could not grow to be identified with a past which
was unknown to them, or known only through recitals that disfigured
it.... Amidst the remnants of a society that had been historical,
there was, as it were, the b