elf was thinking of a retreat, when Mme de Stael came to
release him from the ambuscade into which he had fallen. She retained
him near the door, and there was a grave conversation on the English
constitution. Mme de Stael could not reconcile the idea of political
liberty, with the prevalence of servile forms remaining in the
individual relationships of a society so jealous of that liberty as
England.

'"Language and aristocratic customs do not annoy people living in a
country that is really free," said the Duke. "We use these unimportant
formulae in compliment to the past, and preserve our ceremonies as we
keep a memorial, even when it has lost its primitive destination."

'"But is it true," asked Mme de Stael, "that your lord chancellor
speaks to the king on his bended knee during the opening address or
sitting of parliament?"

'"Yes; quite true."

'"How _does_ he do it?"

'"He speaks to him kneeling, as I have told you."

'"But how?"

'"Must I shew you? You _will_ have it!" answered the Duke; and he
threw himself at the feet of our Corinna.

'"I wish everybody could see him," cried Mme de Stael.

'And everybody there did applaud with one accord. I would not answer
for the same unanimity of approbation among the same people after they
had reached the foot of the staircase.

'Everybody went away, only I stayed two hours with the mistress of the
house and M. Schlegel, whose anger against the abbe did not wear out.
These two hours Mme de Stael's conversation enchanted me, proving how
much there is to attach us in one who can live at one and the same
time so near and yet so far above the world.... I might pass many
evenings in recounting in detail the conversation of this evening.
There is more than matter for a book in a two hours' talk with Mme de
Stael. I had better go to bed, that I may be able to tell you
to-morrow all I can only leave you to guess at now.'[3]

And now we come to a later period, and Mme Sophie Gay shall give place
to her lively and clever daughter Delphine, Mme Emile Girardin.

'Parisian society,' she writes, 'now, in 1839, offers the strangest
aspect that ever was seen--a mixture of luxury and rudeness, English
propriety and French negligence, political absurdities and
revolutionary terrors, of which it is hard to form a just conception.
The luxury of the salons is truly Eastern, not only the salons,
indeed, but the anterooms: an anteroom in a handsome hotel is more
richly adorned th