ecognized his old
flowers of 1789: "Ah, here are our plants of Trianon!"

And, like their masters the Bourbons, the emigrants had also returned to
France with the same ideas with which they had fled the country. They
endeavored, in all their manners, habits, and pretensions, to begin
again precisely where they had left off in 1789. They had so lively an
appreciation of their own merit, that they took no notice whatever of
other people's, and yet their greatest merit consisted in having
emigrated.

For this merit they now demanded a reward.

All of these returned emigrants demanded rewards, positions, and
pensions, and considered it incomprehensible that those who were already
in possession were not at once deprived of them. Intrigues were the
order of the day, and in general the representatives of the old era
succeeded in supplanting those of the new era in offices and pensions as
well as in court honors. All the high positions in the army were filled
by the marquises, dukes, and counts, of the old era, who had sewed
tapestry and picked silk in Coblentz, while the France of the new era
was fighting on the battle-field, and they now began to teach the
soldiers of the empire the old drill of 1780.

The etiquette of the olden time was restored, and the same luxurious and
lascivious disposition prevailed among these cavaliers of the former
century which had been approved in the _oeil de boeuf_ and in the
_petites maisons_ of the old era.

These old cavaliers felt contempt for the young Frenchmen of the new era
on account of their pedantic morality; they scornfully regarded men who
perhaps had not more than one mistress, and to whom the wife of a friend
was so sacred, that they never dared to approach her with a
disrespectful thought even.

These legitimist gentlemen entertained themselves chiefly with
reflections over the past, and their own grandeur. In the midst of the
many new things by which they were surrounded, some of which they
unfortunately found it impossible to ignore, it was their sweetest
relaxation to give themselves up entirely to the remembrance of the old
_regime_, and when they spoke of this era, they forgot their age and
debility, and were once more the young _roues_ of the _oeil de boeuf_.

Once in the antechamber of King Louis XVIII., while the Marquis de
Chimene and the Duke de Lauraguais, two old heroes of the frivolous era,
in which the boudoir and the _petites maisons_ were the battle-field,