sed, and the house razed." The Comte de Saint-Brice's
fears must have been allayed on this evening. Everything was in its
place,--horses, servants, husband, drawing-room, house. Madame Emile de
Girardin was in full dress; the manuscript tragedy was in her lap. I
found in the drawing-room Monsieur Victor Hugo, Monsieur de Lamartine,
Monsieur Alfred de Musset, the three stars of our poetical heavens;
Monsieur Theophile Gautier, Monsieur Mery, Monsieur Paulin Limayrac, the
secondary planets; Madame George Sand, the great Amazon novelist; some
doctors, some artists, two or three actors from the French Comedy, and
some other gentlemen. At this period of time Madame Emile de Girardin
was forty-five years old. Her flatterers still spoke of her beauty. Her
conversation was dazzling, but it lacked charm: her talents forced
themselves upon one; her _bons mots_ took you by storm. Strength had
overcome everything like grace, and two hours' conversation with Madame
Emile de Girardin left one with a sick-headache or exhausted by fatigue.
Nevertheless, one of her most fervent admirers has uttered this singular
paradox about her: "She would be the first woman of the age, if she had
always talked and never written a line."

Her husband, Monsieur Emile de Girardin, was present, with his pale
face, lymphatic complexion, glassy eye, and forehead checkered with a
Napoleon-like lock. He was then, and has remained ever since, the most
exact personification of a pasteboard man of genius lighted by
histrionic foot-lights. He was a compound of the dandy, the sophist, and
the agitator. His talents lay in making people believe him in possession
of ideas, when he had none,--just as speculators disseminate the
illusion of their capital, when in reality they are worse than bankrupt.
He began what others have since completed,--that is, he made trade and
advertisements the sovereign masters of literature and newspapers.
Abetted by the spirit of the age, he introduced into the intellectual
world the risks and unexpected hazards of stock-jobbing circles. He made
a great deal of money in this trade, and, besides, it gave him the
pleasure of making a great deal of noise in the world, of overturning
governments, of dreaming of being minister, nay, prime-minister, when
the day may come in which good, sense is to be challenged and France
made bankrupt. Everybody around him, even his wife, seemed to accept his
superiority for something unquestionable. Their uni