s, she, when we
were gone, spoke quite as ill of him, and believed it also. Nevertheless,
excellent persons were they both; only they had quarreled about the
propriety or the impropriety of a bout at single-stick! Such a thing is
anger!

A Reminiscence Of The French Emigration.

In my childhood I knew many of the numerous colony which took refuge in
London from the horrors of the First French Revolution. The lady at whose
school I was educated, and he was so much the more efficient partner that
it was his school rather than hers, had married a Frenchman, who had been
secretary to the Comte de Moustiers, one of the last embassadors, if not
the very last, from Louis Seize to the Court of St. James's. Of course he
knew many emigrants of the highest rank, and indeed of all ranks; and
being a lively, kind-hearted man, with a liberal hand, and a social
temper, it was his delight to assemble as many as he could of his poor
countrymen and countrywomen around his hospitable supper-table.

Something wonderful and admirable it was to see how these dukes and
duchesses, marshals and marquises, chevaliers and bishops, bore up under
their unparalleled reverses! How they laughed and talked, and squabbled,
and flirted, constant to their high heels, their rouge, and their
furbelows, to their old liaisons, their polished sarcasms, their cherished
rivalries! They clung even to their _marriages de convenance_, and the
very habits which would most have offended our English notions, if we had
seen them in their splendid hotels of the Faubourg St. Germain, won
tolerance and pardon when mixed up with such unaffected constancy, and
such cheerful resignation.

For the most part these noble exiles had a trifling pecuniary dependency;
some had brought with them jewels enough to sustain them in their simple
lodgings in Knightsbridge or Pentonville, to some a faithful steward
contrived to forward the produce of some estate too small to have been
seized by the early plunderers; to others a rich English friend would
claim the privilege of returning the kindness and hospitality of by-gone
years. But very many lived literally on the produce of their own industry,
the gentlemen teaching languages, music, fencing, dancing, while their
wives and daughters went out as teachers or governesses, or supplied the
shops with those objects of taste in millinery or artificial flowers for
which their country is unrivaled. No one was ashamed of these exerti