ic royal power, of brilliant
manners, of intrigues, of aristocratic ideas, of ease and luxury.
Opposed to them stood the France of the new era, the generation formed
by Napoleon and the revolution, the new aristocracy, who possessed no
other ancestors than merit and valorous deeds, an aristocracy that had
nothing to relate of the _oeil de boeuf_ and the _petites maisons_, but
an aristocracy that could tell of the battle-field and of the hospitals
in which their wounds had been healed.

These two parties stood opposed to each other.

Old and young France now carried on an hourly, continuous warfare at the
court of Louis XVIII., with this difference, however, that young France,
hitherto ever victorious, now experienced a continuous series of
reverses and humiliations. Old France was now victorious. Not victorious
through its gallantry and merit, but through its past, which it
endeavored to connect with the present, without considering the chasm
which lay between.

True, King Louis had agreed, in the treaty of the 11th of April, that
none of his subjects should be deprived of their titles and dignities;
and the new dukes, princes, marshals, counts, and barons, could
therefore appear at court, but they played but a sad and humiliating
_role_, and they were made to feel that they were only tolerated, and
not welcome.

The gentlemen who, before the revolution, had been entitled to seats in
the royal equipages, still retained this privilege, but the doors of
these equipages were never opened to the gentlemen of the new Napoleonic
nobility. "The ladies of the old era still retained their _tabouret,_ as
well as their grand and little _entree_ to the Tuileries and the Louvre,
and it would have been considered very arrogant if the duchesses of the
new era had made claim to similar honors."

It was the Duchess d'Angouleme who took the lead and set the Faubourg
St. Germain an example of intolerance and arrogant pretensions in
ignoring the empire. She was the most unrelenting enemy of the new era,
born of the revolution, and of its representatives; it is true, however,
that she, who was the daughter of the beheaded royal pair, and who had
herself so long languished in the Temple, had been familiar with the
horrors of the revolution in their saddest and most painful features.
She now determined, as she could no longer punish, to at least forget
this era, and to seem to be entirely oblivious of its existence.

At one of the firs