century carries
in itself and which it drags with it everywhere smiling,--_ennui_." (_La
Femme au XVIIIe siecle._)

The very original methods employed by one of these clever ladies at the
very beginning of the century to avoid this all-pervading weariness of
the spirit furnished Theophile Gautier with the title and the theme of
one of his best romances. _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ lived in the flesh of
Mademoiselle d'Aubigny, offspring of a good family, who ran away from
the paternal mansion at the age of fourteen and fell in love with a
fencing-master who made of her a fighter of the very first order.
Nothing that the most successful romancer could desire was wanting in
her life,--abductions, disguises, duels, convents forced and set on
fire: "Don Juan was only a commonplace fop in comparison with the
incredible good fortunes of this terrible virago who changed her costume
as she did her visage, courted, indifferently and always with the same
success, one sex or the other, according as she was in an impulsive or a
sentimental vein." She had a fine voice, became a member of the Opera
troupe under the name of _la Maupin_, and sang with success in the
_Psyche_, the _Armide_, and the _Atys_ of Lully. One of her most famous
duels ensued from her too assiduous attentions to a young lady one night
at a ball at the Palais-Royal, in the last days of the reign of Louis
XIV. The husband, the brother, and the lover all took up the quarrel,
and were all three neatly run through the body, one after the other, in
the snowy court-yard below. Then the victor, calm and smiling, returned
to offer _his_ arm to the beauty.

Another of these epicene sworders, diplomat, publicist, and captain of
dragoons, reader for the Empress Elizabeth of Russia, in the suite of
Marie-Antoinette at Versailles, preserved the secret of his sex until
his death. This was the adventurer D'Eon de Beaumont, whose career
excited such a lively interest in both England and France, and who
signed himself, in a letter addressed to Madame de Stael during the
Revolution, _citoyenne de la nouvelle Republique francaise, citoyenne de
l'ancienne Republique des lettres_.

On the 3d of May, 1814, a Bourbon king was again in the Tuileries. All
the tremendous work of the Revolution and the Empire seemed undone.
"Brusquely, without any transitions," says M. Henri Noel, "the standard
of men and things was lowered many degrees. To the epopee succeeds the
bourgeois drama, not to s