the Bibliothèque du Roi, the arguments and legal precedents to establish her husband's right to the regency. In the correspondence of the Comtesse de Sabran, a beautiful young widow in the days of Louis Seize, with the Chevalier de Boufflers, to whom she was engaged, and afterwards married, we find her reproaching him for not writing to her in Latin, telling him that he is so severe a critic she dare not send him her translation of Pythagoras and of the Ode of Claudius on Old Age. She is reading the letters of Abelard and Eloisa in Latin, with such pleasure, that she is translating some of them. She explains to him an effect of light which puzzled him, adding that she had gone through three courses of lectures on chemistry and physics in her life, and retained them. In the journal of her daily life, she says: "I get up at seven, I write and study till eleven, then after déjeuner I paint until dinner time at a fulllength portrait of La Comtesse Auguste de la Marck "--the Princesse d'Arenberg (her intimate friend), who shared these studies. She is also painting a large historical picture. All this is intermixed with accounts of the fêtes she went to, and in the most womanly and tender letters. I saw this lady at an advanced age; she died as late as 1833.

In the last century, the Grande Dame was invariably educated at a convent. It is a mistake to suppose her education was neglected. The nuns, it is true, taught little besides the fairy needlework, in which they excelled, and the reverential, if somewhat narrow and childish, religion of which the reverence at least remained with their pupils through life. No woman, at least in noble society, was outwardly negligent of the observances of the Church, and to speak of them even slightingly would have been esteemed the acme of bad taste. True, some women of the great families during the few years preceding the Revolution, led away by the genius of Voltaire and his school, and by the

influence of the times, abjured in great measure their early religious beliefs; but these were exceptions, and in most cases they returned in their old age to the faith instilled into their youthful hearts. Beside this training from the nuns, they received from professors of almost every branch of literature (too often neglected with us) a solid education des études serieuses, continued when they left the convent by M. l'Abbé, their brother's tutor, and far different from the light reading and showy accomplishments of these days. This lasted even beyond their early marriage, which was not considered as emancipating them from study.

The Revolution, with its horrors, or a life of exile and wandering, must have interrupted the studies of the Grande Dame as I knew her in my childish days. I was not of an age to judge of her in that respect, except from what I have since heard from her grandchildren. Those that I recollect up to 1830, when we finally left Paris, a few months before the second revolution, were some of them between seventy and eighty, the survivors of '93. Some had passed through the prisons waiting daily for death, and saved only by Robespierre's fall; others had seen parents and husbands torn from them to the scaffold. Others, mere children at that fearful time, had been rescued by devoted nurses, or with their parents had found timely refuge in England or Germany. One there was, who, when but ten years old, had watched from the window of her home the fête for the marriage of the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette (May 1770), and had witnessed the fearful disaster by which so many perished on that day, almost on the spot where the guillotine was to stand twenty years later. She had episodes of her court life after marriage to relate to us, of her hairbreadth escapes, of her flight to exile. There was the old Princesse de V—————x, who passed through the Terreur shut up in one room in her Paris home (whence she had refused to emigrate), watched by two gardes nationaux, her life only

saved by an unknown protector in the revolutionary tribunal. Many returned when the danger was passed, to resume, though impoverished, their former existence, amid the wreck of families and fortunes which they had refused to retrieve by adherence to the Empire. Others returned only at the Restoration, having lived in the narrow circle of the émigrés unaltered in ideas, n'ayant rien appris, et rien oublié, and bringing with them the traditions and manners of bygone days. Some would still call Napoleon M. Bonaparte, and would date in 1814 "20ème année du règne de Louis XVIII." It is said that they even altered history. I have been told that a printed history exists which states that S. M. Louis XVIII. gave the command of his armies and the government of his kingdom to M. Bonaparte, not liking after his brother's death to return to France for some years.

There is wonderful vitality in aged French women, particularly of the noble class-not only are they as a rule long-lived, but the vigour of their mind and faculties remains intact to advanced age, and strengthens the tenacity of habits and ideas which was a characteristic of the Grande Dame. She came from exile, after ten or fifteen years passed, perhaps in England, amongst a race different in all things from her own, and with many of whom she was on even affectionate terms. But not one thought, not one prejudice was modified; as a drop of oil cast on a stream will be tossed about, surrounded, pressed upon, but never mingle with the water, she remained in the midst of a world of progress, her own unaltered self.

They were noble old women ; I remember still the sort of awe with which I looked on those venerable relics of a past already become history. Differing in character, as all human beings differ, and some of them twenty years younger than the others, there were still amongst them some general features of resemblance, a certain strange assemblage of contrasts. What

She

struck you first about her (and which still distinguishes French ladies) was her ton and language-always strictly grammatical, and pure French, but startling you by its almost brusque bonhomie, its utter absence of all affectation or self-consciousness, homely in expression, but never trivial; above all things she eschewed fine words, and stilted phrases. L'épicier dit mon épouse, le roi dit ma femme, was the principle on which she spoke; but no vulgarisms, no slang or cant ever sullied her lips; she spoke well, and pithily, not unfrequently with short, sharp sentences, qui emportaient la pièce, if she happened to be offended. spoke with decision, with the authority of one who knows that she is respectfully listened to. Her manner was generally perfect in its ease and adaptation to the person addressed; in its natural unstudied felicity of expression; illustrating the axiom that to conceal art is the acme of art. French women are fond of talking; it is no effort to them; the shyness which in us English so often destroys destroys the grace and power of speaking is, if it exists, so combated in their earliest years that it is unknown to them. With her simple grandes manières, perfectly civil and well bred, she knew how to draw the line-elaborately, ceremoniously civil to those whom she did not wish to admit within her circle, or encourage to return; while with her own intimates she gladly relapsed into the familiar snufftaking, the not over particular talk her soul rejoiced in (for she called a spade a spade if she had occasion to mention it), or topics of conversation perhaps not in general use with us; such she considered it affectation to avoid. But it was all said in such grand simplicity, so evidently without any idea of shocking her hearers or indeed any idea that it could or ought to shock them — that you could not feel annoyed. She had mostly mother wit, and those equable spirits and cheerful temperament which alone could have carried her through

mistress, was the cook-always a man, for the cuisinière only belonged to the bourgeoisie.

My Grande Dame was invariably fond of her dinner, rather boasted of being gourmande. The Princesse de Poix used to hold as an axiom, que le signe distinctif d'une femme bien née, c'est de se connaître en cuisine. French ladies mostly satisfy this requirement. They drink very little wine, generally de l'eau rougie, no tea or coffee after dinner, but they are not afraid of a tiny glass of the delicious liqueurs that are served round in such numbers at a French house.

Whatever the variety of character between them, there is one point in which all agree, love of conversation. The Grande Dame's real enjoyment in life was her salon. By this term is meant a reception held every evening, where the guests never expect food, or invitation after their first introduction. The salons I speak of were, I imagine, rather restricted to their own circle. I was too young at the time to go into society, so it is only from what I heard from my young friends, and from those I have since seen, that I can trace the difference which seems to have existed between the past and the present society. The halo of veneration which surrounded the aged grandmother, the heroine, the victim of catastrophes and misfortunes, of which perhaps history offers no other example, made her and her tastes and amusement the one object of the family reception; but they were not so amusing to others, with the exception of the Hôtel Beauvau, and one or two isolated cases. Still they were very agreeable ways of passing the evening, judging from the few which survived the reverses of 1830.

The

came the first guest, yielding the place in turns to each arrival. The other elderly ladies had their work at a table apart, where the visitors came to pay their devoirs; and-again apart-the young women and girls of the family, perhaps at a tea-table, a novelty then beginning to come in, although not much understood, for a girl friend said to me one day," Comment va ta maman?" "Mais bien; pourquoi?" "Ah! c'est qu'elle prenait du thé hier." They still considered it as a tisane and medicinal. Politics were not talked at these houses, for the simple reason that the Grande Dame had none but loyalty. To her there was but one party-Monarchy; but one danger-Democracy. La Charte was something Louis XVIII. had kindly given to his people, but was never to interfere with his good pleasure of sending away one set of ministers for another, or passing any laws or enactments. Her code was neither Liberal nor Conservative, but les Gentilhommes et la Canaille. Strange as it may seem to us, such was her world of ideas from 1804 to 1830. There were in Paris at that time, as later, many salons, all differing in their society, literary, political, artistic, diplomatic, scientific, even theatrical; some receiving the young and brilliant world, some devoted to the graver questions of the day, some combining on one day in the week all parties, all specialities-except les ennuyeux. It would be far beyond my scope to enter into details of them. There is a charming volume called Les Salons de Paris, written, I believe, by M. E. de Girardin, which may enlighten English people as to a form of society which does not exist and never can flourish in England.

During the last ten years of the Restoration these salons constituted the chief société of the noblesse. Louis Dix-huit, infirm and selfish, did little towards restoring the brilliancy of former days. Few courtiers survived the emigration. the emigration. My Grande Dame's husband, if still alive, was a chambellan, but probably too old to attend Court,

certainly too old to give life to it. They led a very dull existence. Too poor to give fêtes themselves, and avoiding the new nobility, they only went to the Court or Embassies, and occasionally to the Rothschild's and Delmar's, as neutral houses.

The gloom of Charles Dix's Court, after the assassination of the Duc de Berri, closed the door to all but the friends and adherents of the old order of things. The young generation began to horrify their parents by their indifference to such dull amusements and wearisome favours. The young widowed Duchesse de Berri, after a few years of seclusion, attempted to give again some animation to the Tuileries, but she failed, and who can wonder that, unheeding the royal frowns, she collected around her the rebellious youth of the noble Faubourg, and with them sought, in the brilliant circle of the Palais Royal, the pleasures denied them in the stern and solemn Tuileries With her young cousins-the Duc de Chartres, growing into manhood with the promise he so well kept of being the handsomest and most charming man of his day; with the Duc d'Aumale, and the rest of the gay young troupe, they rode, they drove ponies, they read books à l'index,

they went to masked balls; it was said that, worst of all, they learnt English, and that, ignoring Waterloo, some of them actually visited London in the season, bringing back English fashions in horses and ar riages, and even the taste for crts, which before then were mere politia réunions. The parents wisely felt that the next generation must progress with their times; they had too much sense to attempt to stem the torrent. The grandmother in her salon, though shorn of the pomp of her former stately existence, impoverished, but surrounded by her children's love and care, attended as dutifully as ever by the young reformers themselves, glided away her last days, scarcely realising the changes around her. She was growing very old, she had no longer vigour to use her restraining influence, had she retained it. To her darkening sight the cloud which was lowering over the Monarchy bore no threat. Few of them lived to see the Bourbons a third time dethroned, driven to exile or death. Before the Revolution of 1830 most of them died away, and with the accession of the Régime Bourgeois ended the Grande Dame de l'Ancien Régime.

AUGUSTA L. CADOGAN.