e
will recur to Mme. Ancelot for a really very true description of two
persons who were among the _habitues_ of the closing years of
Gerard's weekly receptions, and one of whom was destined to universal
celebrity: we allude to Mme. Gay, and her daughter, Delphine,--later,
Mme. Girardin. Of these two, the mother, famous as Sophie Gay, was as
thorough a remnant of the exaggerations and bad taste of the Empire as
were the straight, stiff, mock-classical articles of furniture of the
Imperialist hotels, or the _or-moulu_ clocks so ridiculed by
Balzac, on which turbaned Mamelukes mourned their expiring steeds. All
the false-heroics of the literature of the Empire found their
representative (their last one, perhaps) in Mme. Sophie Gay, and it
has not been sufficiently remarked that she even transmitted a shade
of all this to her daughter, in other respects one of the most
sagacious spirits and one of the most essentially unconventional of
our own day. A certain something that was not in harmony with the tone
of contemporary writers here and there surprised you in Delphine de
Girardin's productions, and, as Jules Janin once said, "One would
think the variegated plumes of Murat's fantastic hat[2] were sweeping
through her brains!" This was her mother's doing. Delphine, who had
never lived during one hour of the glory of the Empire, had, through
the medium of her mother, acquired a slight tinge of its
_boursouflure_; and had it not been for her own personal good
taste, she would have been misled precisely by her strong lyrical
aptitudes. Madame Gay found in Gerard's _salon_ all the people
she had best known in her youth, and she was delighted to have her
early years recalled to her. Mme. Ancelot, who, like many of her
country women, felt a marked antipathy for Madame Gay, has given a
very true portrait of both mother and daughter.

"Many years after," she writes, "when these ladies were (through M. de
Girardin) at the head of one of the chief organs of the Paris press,
they were much flattered and courted; at the period I speak of" (about
1817-1825) "their position was far from brilliant, and Mme. Gay was
far from popular. Every word that fell from her mouth, uttered in a
sharp tone, and full of bitterness and envy, went to speak ill of
others and prodigiously well of herself. She had a mania for titles
and tuft-hunting, and could speak of no one under a marquis, a count,
or a baron. Her daughter's beauty and talents caused her