where, with an eye as keen as any at the table, the great-grandmother presided over four generations, beginning with her own already aged sons or daughters, and ending with the baby in its high chair attended by its Normande nurse, in her fly cap, feeding it with broth out of a glass--a very nasty-looking proceeding, by the by. At the top of the table near the lady sat the old friend, who, according to invariable custom, came on a certain day of the week—his other days being similarly filled up at other hospitable houses. Then some relation who had in poverty found an asylum with the head of the house. The lectrice, or companion of the old lady, M. l'Abbé, the friend and counsellor of the family; interspersed with them the married sons and daughters; the boys with their tutor; rarely the men of the family, at least the young ones, but all the children. The déjeuner was good, but plain; soup, cutlets (without sauce), filets of beef with fried potatoes, omelettes and cheese, of which an immense variety is eaten in France, and fruit. The dinner, at six o'clock, was a repetition of the déjeuner minus the baby and its broth, and plus fish, entrées, and sweets, as well as the men of the family, who were often out in the morning, receiving in friendly houses the same sans façon hospitality they left in their own. Still it would have been difficult and inconvenient to invite strangers to such unceremonious meals, and there being no schoolroom table (because there were no schoolrooms), it was impossible to break up the heterogeneous assemblage except on great gala occasions. The result was that in those days no, or at least, very few, French families gave dinners.

After the déjeuner and a visit to Bonnemaman, as the grandmother is prettily called in French, when we were duly presented and given the freedom of the house in torrents of mon bijou, charmante, délicieuse, duly distributed to us all with laudable impartiality, and accompanied by No. 216.-VOL. XXXVI.

pastilles de chocolat, which I appreciated much more, we were dismissed to the garden-not the miserable strip of modern Paris (when it has one), but shade in summer, sunny walks in winter, and space enough in those airy quarters of the town to dispense with going out of its walls for daily exercise. In those days there were few open carriages, fewer still with one horse; and the coachman and pair of fat old horses were kept chiefly for evening, or for the necessary work of the day. The young women drove au Bois with their husbands in cabriolets or curricles, which came from England, and were beginning to be a fashion. French women, as a rule, walk less, but live more in the open air than we do. In fine weather they sat almost entirely in their gardens, reading, writing, working, many days never going out of it, except à la messe in the morning to some small church close by, which was the almost universal custom of the higher classes. French servants, shopkeepers, in general all women of the lower classes, both town and country, sit outside their doors at their work whenever the weather allows of it. They are to be seen at the door of the palace as of the cottage, or under the porte cochère in the shade, carding mattresses, shelling peas, dressing their children, working, or spinning; not a moment will they be indoors that they can help. Sometimes we children were all taken to the Tuileries by the bonne of the family. There, in a sunny corner, sheltered by the terraces overlooking the Place de la Concorde, and named from its warmth La petite Provence, we exercised ourselves at the skippingrope with a proficiency I look back to with admiration, double twirls in one leap being highly applauded by the critical audience of fly-caps—each with a fusty-looking baby in her arms— and wooden-legged Invalides, its usual frequenters, whose appreciation we much coveted. There were also some gaufres, a sort of pancake, thin and crisp, made instantaneously in an iron.

K K

shovel on a little charcoal stove, which, by permission of the authorities, was allowed in one corner for the delectation of the fly-caps and their charges; also a honey wafer, called plaisirs, and fresh milk were to be had here, as in all public promenades at Paris. These were provided for by a few sous put into our tiny pockets with a lump of bread, for the goûter, a sort of nondescript meal, of any trash obtainable, which French children have as a stopgap between déjeuner and dinner. Alas! I have since seen my poor petite Provence filled with savage Turcos and Zouaves instead of kind old Invalides, and camp-fires replacing the little gaufre stove of my childish days.

The old custom of bringing up girls in convents was fast dying out. Many of our young friends were educated at home, or, at all events, only went to a convent the year preceding and following their first communion, a time always with them spent in retirement. If at home, they did not come down when there was company, that their minds should not be distracted from the solemnity of the act. There are, or at least there were, no governesses in these families. If the daughters were brought up at home, they, and indeed the sons also, were so much with their mothers, that no assistance but that of masters and the old bonne who had nursed them, was required.

French women are in general devoted mothers, seldom leaving their children, and expending upon them what the poet calls "the strong necessity of loving," to which many of their marriages formerly gave little aliment. Amongst them is many a mute inglorious Sévigné, who lacked not Sévigné's feelings for her daughter, exaggerated as they may seem to us, but only the power of expressing them. Their time is much more their own in the day than with us, because morning visiting does not exist, none but a sister or an intimate is admitted before the evening, which is considered the time for society; they were therefore free to attend to their favourite pursuits

and studies, or to their children's education. They did not formerly, as we do, and they do now, go to the sea-side, travel, pay country visits. The great families had magnificent châteaux, but these had mostly been saccage at the Revolution, and there were no means to refurnish them; some were very far off, and a journey to Touraine or Provence, before the days of railways, was too heavy an expense. They often preferred leaving them unoccupied, and, if rich enough, had villas on the beautiful hills of St. Germain, or Meudon, or even nearer Paris, where within a walk from the Champs Elysées were some charming country houses, with farms and green fields, now covered with streets and shops. In one of these beautiful residences, Le Val, in the Forêt de St. Germain, belonging to the old Princesse de Poix, I passed many never-to-beforgotten days. The family consisted of the blind grandmother, looking like a Rembrandt stepped out of its frame, and her two sons, the eldest a widower with an only child; she herself a widow after a year's marriage, her young husband buried under the snows of the Russian retreat. Celebrated over Europe for her wit and charm, she refused the most brilliant offers of marriage to devote herself to her father and her only child, a daughter. The second son, one of those rare characters of unostentatious piety, living but for the good he could do in this world of suffering, entirely occupied with social questions on the improvement of the lower classes, to which he devoted his life, the best of sons, of fathers, of husbands. His wife, a Talleyrand, holding by her birth not more than by her kindness and virtues, a position which led even the Great Emperor to press her acceptance of the post of Grande Maîtresse to Marie Louise; and caused her to take the same post with the young Duchesse de Berri at the Restoration, which she retained in society as long as she lived. Their mantle descended on the four bright handsome children, with whom

we roamed the beautiful forest. The eldest son took a prominent part in political and utilitarian life in his own province. The second was wellknown as a diplomate in England. To name the daughter, Mrs. S. Standish, is but to recall virtues, charms, and talents, celebrated in the literary and social world of her own and her adopted country. A family of perfect affection, of unpretending goodness; whom to know was to love. It is of such as these (and they were not so unique in that society) that we loftily shrug our insular shoulders, and thank Heaven we are not as these foreigners

are.

We often pronounce French women frivolous in their pursuits, reading, and lives; this I think an unjust judgment. What I saw of French women in former days has led me to the contrary conclusion; I do not speak of the present generation, but let us see what is the witness of French history as far back as the reign of Le Grand Monarque. In that most charming of books, Mdme. de Sévigné's Letters, we find that ladies read and understood Descartes' philosophy, the theological disputes of the Jansenists and the Port Royal, Laplace's Astronomy, the writings of Pascal, Latin and even Greek authors, history in its driest forms, algebra, &c. See the list she sends her daughter of the books she provides herself, and le bien bon, l'Abbé de Coulanges, for a rainy week aux Rochers. It is like the menu of a firstclass competitive examination. It includes St. Augustine, Bourdaloue, and Massillon as pious reading; as light reading, pour nous délasser, Dante and Tasso in Italian, and Delisle's translation of Virgil; as fiction, Le Grand Cyrus, and some works by the bel esprits of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, whom Molière was already flagellating in Les Précieuses Ridicules, but whose influence even Mdme. de Sevigne's sound sense had not shaken off.

Absurd as was the use women in

66

Ôter, pour faire bien, du grenier de céans Cette longue lunette à faire peur aux gens, Ne point aller chercher ce qu'on fait dans la lune,

Et vous mêler un peu de ce qu'on fait chez vous,

Où nous voyons aller tout sens-dessusdessous.

Et l'on sait tout chez moi, hors ce qu'il faut savoir;

Mes gens à la science aspirent pour vous plaire.

Et tous ne font rien moins que ce qu'ils ont à faire."

From this, and from the perfect scene in which the bluestocking dismisses her cook, because her language is not that of Vaugelas (the great grammarian of the period), as well as from the plot of Les Précieuses Ridicules, where the valets personate their masters and talk the pedantic jargon of the period, it is evident that the servants of these femmes savantes participated in the studies and pretensions of the house. This epoch of bad taste passed away; but all French memoirs, down to the Revolution of '92, prove that the education of women of the highest rank embraced even abstruse studies. History tells us that the Duchesse du Maine, one of the most beautiful and dissipated women of the Court of Louis Quinze, herself collated, in secret from

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 fete 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 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