Chapter VI: Part 6

Louis XIV was preceded to the tomb by his only son, the dauphin, in April, 1711; by the Duc de Bourgogne, become dauphin in February, 1712, his wife having died six days before; by the Duc de Bretagne, eldest of the sons of the Duc de Bourgogne, three weeks after his parents; by the Duc de Berry, grandson of the king, on the 4th of May, 1714. Such a succession of calamities roused the gravest suspicions, and the Duc d'Orléans, afterward regent, openly accused of the use of poison, seriously contemplated demanding permission of the king to constitute himself prisoner till these calumnies should be silenced. There remained only a young prince, the Duc d'Anjou, son of the Duc de Bourgogne and Marie-Adélaide de Savoie, five years old at this date, and so delicate that his life was despaired of. He, however, lived to become Louis XV. Louis XIV, after having declared his sons by the Marquise de Montespan, the Duc du Maine and the Comte de Toulouse, heirs to the crown in default of princes of the blood, and making them members of the Council of the Regency, died September 1, 1715, at the age of seventy-seven.

His testament, as he had foreseen, was set aside, much as his father's had been. Philippe d'Orléans summoned the Parlement, which granted him full power as regent, with freedom to compose the council as he liked, and the government of the royal household was taken from the Duc du Maine after a most unseemly altercation. All the solemn and pompous traditions of the court were likewise abandoned. "What does it matter to the State," said the regent, "whether it is I or my lackey who rides in a carriage." He took for his minister and councillor the Abbé Dubois, "a little, thin man, like a weasel," said Saint-Simon, "in whom _all_ the vices, perfidiousness, avarice, debauchery, ambition, and base flattery, struggled for the mastery." The general demoralization caused by the collapse of the great financial schemes of John Law was only a feature in the general abandonment of all restraint in the pursuit of pleasure. In the midst of this luxury of effrontery, there suddenly appeared the imposing and barbaric figure of Peter the Great of Russia, who visited Paris in the spring of 1717, and dismayed the court and the Parisians by the simplicity and directness of his character, his disregard for their voluptuous frivolity, and his appreciation of the things only that make for greatness in a State. He did not hesitate to prophesy, from what he saw and learned, the approaching decadence and ruin of the French monarchy and the French people.

At the age of thirteen, in February, 1723, Louis XV was declared to have attained his majority and assumed the reins of government, nominally at least, for the regent had taken care to give him Dubois for prime minister. Both these illustrious personages, however, died in the course of the year, and were succeeded by the Duc de Bourbon, "ugly and one-eyed, low, mediocre, hypocritical, a man of little led by a woman of nothing, Madame de Prie," and who renewed the persecution of the Protestants and the Jansenists. The young king contented himself with "showing at the council table his handsome and impassible countenance, which nothing ever animated. When not thus engaged, when he was neither gambling nor hunting, he occupied himself with tapestry-making, turning snuff-boxes in wood, or reading either the secret correspondence with his ambassadors, which he maintained unknown to his ministers, or the scandalous recitals which the lieutenant of police sent him regularly every day." In the latter part of his reign, these habits were succeeded by even more ignoble ones, drunkenness and nameless vices.

To maintain his own power, the Duc de Bourbon sent back to Spain the Infanta, who had been brought to Paris, at the age of four, to fit her for her future position as Queen of France, and married the king to Marie Leczinska, daughter of the dethroned King of Poland, then living at Wissembourg on the charity of the French government. One day, this Stanislas Leczinski entered the chamber in which his wife and daughter were sitting, and said to them in great excitement: "Let us get down on our knees and thank God!" "Are you recalled to the throne of Poland?" asked his daughter. "Much better; you are Queen of France." She was seven years older than the king, very poor, without beauty, but gentle and pious. The insult offered to the court of Spain was but one of the many blunders and failures of the foreign diplomacy, while the extravagance and debauchery at home kept pace with the growing disorder in the national finances. The sum total of the funds disbursed during "the nineteen years of the _reign_ of Madame de Pompadour, drawn up by her orders, exceeds thirty-six millions of livres, equivalent to more than sixty millions at the present day." In 1780, under Louis XVI, the amount of pensions paid by the government reached the sum of twenty-eight millions, and soon after rose to thirty-two. "I doubt," said Necker, in his _Compte rendu_, "if all the sovereigns of Europe pay in pensions the half of this sum." At the same time, the officers of the household of Louis XV were frequently unpaid, and it was more than once necessary, as it had been in the reign of his illustrious predecessor, to appeal to bourgeois and nobles to bring their silverware to the treasury to be melted down, that the national administration might not be utterly bankrupt. "Never," said the Comte de Maistres, during the Terror, "did a great crime have so many accomplices: there are doubtless some innocent sufferers among the victims, but they are very much fewer than is generally supposed."

The marriage of the dauphin, afterward Louis XVI, with the Austrian archduchess, Marie-Antoinette, in May, 1770, was attended with a frightful catastrophe during the celebration of the event, on the evening of the 30th, on the Place Louis XV, now Place de la Concorde,--hundreds of persons being crushed to death, trampled under foot, killed with swords, or with the fireworks which burst in their midst. It was an ill omen for the future. The accession to the throne of this youthful pair, in 1774, was hailed with pleasing anticipations by the nation, wearied with the excesses of the late reign. "What joy," said Michelet, "to see seated at last on the purified throne of Louis XV this virtuous, this excellent young king and this charming queen! Who would not have hoped for everything? A grand movement of art adorned this coronation, illuminated the scene. And the queen was the centre of all. One woman only seemed to exist." The graceful, youthful figure of Marie-Antoinette, dauphine, has recently been made the subject of special research by M. Pierre de Molhac, and the intimate relations between court intrigues and the gravest measures of foreign diplomacy are exemplified in the pressure put upon her by her mother, Marie-Thérèse, to treat with more consideration the king's mistress, Madame du Barry, who, the dauphine wrote to her mother, "is the silliest and most impertinent creature imaginable." The consent of Louis XV to the partition of Poland was purchased by the promise of his daughter-in-law to assume the same attitude toward Madame du Barry that her mother had formerly condescended to with respect to Madame du Pompadour. "Louis XV was touched in the most sensitive part of his heart by the tact of his old friend; his silence concerning Poland was paid for in advance."

Amid the general extravagance and corruption of the upper classes of society some attempts were made to preserve the traditions of the famous Hôtel de Rambouillet, _le berceau de la société polie_, where talent, learning, and wit were the qualities that secured distinction, and not pride of birth. Under Louis XIV, this _salon_ was renewed in the fine hôtel of the Marquise de Lambert, in the Ile Saint-Louis,--in modern times restored by Prince Czartoriski,--and in the "Saturdays" of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, one of the greatest literary celebrities that had frequented the receptions of the Marquise de Rambouillet. The Saturdays were a great success, and the example thus set of "having a day" was generally followed; the literary coteries of the _précieuses_--later satirized by Molière--became numerous, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry's receptions were maintained till 1695. Under Louis XVI, in 1780, appeared no less than three social organizations having widely different aims,--the _Société Philanthropique_, the _Société Apollonienne_, which soon changed its title to that of the _Musée_, and the more practical _Société des Mercredis_, which existed for the purpose of encouraging good cooking. But the most distinguished of these reunions, frequented by the higher classes of society, was the _Société Dramatique_ de Madame de Montesson, the mistress of the Duc d'Orléans, who had ended by marrying her with his left hand. In her hôtel in the Rue Chaussée d'Antin, this lady had mounted a theatre, on which she appeared with the prince, and which, from 1770 to 1780, quite maintained the lead in the social diversions of the capital.

With the approach of the Revolution, about the commencement of the year 1785, there was a new movement, in the direction of the organization of a great number of "clubs," a word then new to the Parisian ears, but which was received with great favor. There was already in existence a _Club Politique_, which the government tolerated on the express condition that no discussions of politics or religion were to be permitted,--a condition which was quite disregarded. The Duc d'Orléans, who was very proud of being a member of the _Club Anglais_, founded the _Club de Boston_ or _des Américains_; then there was the _Club des Arcades_, the _Club des Étrangers_, the _Club de la Société Olympique_, the _Club des Artistes_, and several others. The important part played in the bloody drama of the Revolution by the various political clubs, is matter of history. The earliest of these associations, of course, bore a general resemblance to the social institutions which the Parisians now know as _Cercles_; and it may be remarked that one of the most celebrated of the many recent pessimistic publications of the day, the _Grandeur et Décadence des Français_, by M. Gaston Routier, finds one of the many signs of the social demoralization of his countrymen in the number and importance of the cercles in the cities, and especially in the high play that so many of them favor.

To the extravagances and pretended miracles of the sect of the _convulsionnaires_ and those wrought on the tomb of the deacon Paris in the cemetery Saint-Médard in 1730 and 1731, succeeded the extraordinary alleged cures of the German doctor Mesmer, who came to Paris in 1778 with his theory of "animal magnetism,"--theory treated with more respect by many of the _savants_ of the present day than by those of the eighteenth century. The invention of the brothers Montgolfier, practically tested in 1783, awakened an extraordinary interest both in the scientific world and among the populace; and it is related that the American, Benjamin Franklin, being asked what he thought of these new aërial machines, replied: "It is the coming child."

The times were ripe for change: Mademoiselle de Romans, walking in the Tuileries gardens with a little son whom she had born to Louis XV, and pressed by the crowd, exclaimed: "Eh! messieurs and mesdames, do not crush so, and let your king's child breathe!" The Comte d'Artois, who was devoted to the game of tennis, being one day in an ill humor, ordered the court to be cleared of all the spectators, using epithets which were habitual with him: "Drive them all out," he said, "_tous ces b . . . et ces j . . . f . . . !_" No one was left but one officer. "Well, did you not hear what I said?" demanded his Royal Highness. "Yes, monseigneur, but as I am neither a b . . . , nor a j . . . f... , I remained." "The respect for _la noblesse_ was singularly diminished, and the whole audience, even the nobles themselves, applauded at the theatre, in 1784, the bold epigrams of the 'Figaro' of Beaumarchais: 'Because you are a great seigneur, you think yourself a great genius! You have given yourself the trouble to be born; that is all you have done!'"

On the 19th of June, 1789, the Assemblée Nationale, in a session which Marat qualified as "glorious," decreed "that hereditary nobility is forever abolished in France; that, consequently, the titles of marquis, chevalier, écuyer, comte, vicomte, messire, prince, baron, vidame, noble, duc, and all other similar titles cannot be borne by any person whatsoever, nor given to any one; that no citizen shall bear other than his true family name; that no one shall cause his domestics to wear a livery nor have any coats-of-arms, and that incense shall be burned in the temples only in honor of the Divinity." The Assemblée Legislative held its first sitting on the 1st of October, 1792; on the 4th, the deputation of sixty members sent to announce to the king that the body was ready to begin its deliberations hesitated as to what phrases to employ, and finally decided upon _Votre Majesté_. When the deputation returned to give an account of its mission, much dissatisfaction was expressed: "Let there be no more use of this title of 'Majesty,'" exclaimed one member.

"Let us repudiate the title of 'Sire,'" said another.

"There is no longer any majesty here but that of the law and the people," cried Couthon.

It was accordingly decreed that the deputies should seat themselves and cover themselves before the king, that there should be provided but two similar arm-chairs, one for the king and one for the president, and, finally, that the king should receive no other title but that of _Roi des Français_. Louis XVI complained bitterly of this indignity, but it was one of the least he was called upon to endure.

When the royal family were brought into Paris from Versailles by the armed mob, they arrived at the Tuileries at half-past ten in the morning of the 6th of October, 1789. No attempt had been made to prepare for their use this long uninhabited palace, and the little dauphin said to his mother: "Mamma, everything here is very ugly." "My son," she replied, "Louis XIV lived here, and found himself comfortable; we should not be more difficult to please than he was." On the 20th of June, 1791, they made an unsuccessful attempt to escape by flight, in disguise, from the constantly increasing perils that menaced them, but were recognized at Varennes and brought back in captivity. Nevertheless, the king was restored to his executive functions on the 14th of the following September, and it was not until after the attack on the Tuileries, on the 10th of August, 1792, brought about largely by the intrigues of the _émigré_ nobles who had fled over the frontier and by the manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick, the general in command of the Prussian army, announcing that he was coming, in the name of the allied kings, to restore to Louis XVI his authority, that that hapless monarch finally lost it. While his faithful Swiss guards were being massacred in the hopeless defence of his palace, he was sitting, surrounded by his family, in the _loge_ called that of the _logographe_, where he had taken refuge with the Assemblée, watching through the open _grille_, or iron railing, the tumultuous deliberations of that body while it enacted that the chief of the executive power was temporarily suspended from the exercise of his functions. Two days later, they were all conducted to the Temple as prisoners, where the king was lodged on one floor of the grand tower, while the queen, Madame Elisabeth, his sister, the young dauphin and his sister, occupied that above him.

On the 26th of October, the _Journal de Paris_ announced that the ladies had taken possession of their new apartment on the third floor, which consisted "of four rooms very well furnished, two of which had chimneys and the other two, stoves. The son of Capet sleeps in his father's chamber. On a clock in the chamber of Louis there was the inscription: 'Le Pautre, clockmaker to the king.' The name of the king has been effaced and that of the Republic substituted." The "_ci-devant_ royal family" were allowed to promenade in the garden, and the king sometimes walked on the leads of the tower, all the openings of which had been carefully closed so that he could not see below, nor be seen. During five months this captivity was maintained under a constant and frequently outrageous surveillance.

The Bourbons were not without their familiar spectre, a very celebrated one, who appeared to announce the approaching death of a member of the royal family, and on the eve of his execution Louis XVI asked Monsieur de Malesherbes if the White Lady were not walking in the corridors of the Temple. This was the Dame Blanche of the popular saying, who takes an interest in you when all other things cease to be of any concern to you: _La Dame Blanche vous regarde, et les affaires des autres ne vous regardent pas_.

During the Revolution, the Directory, the Consulate, and even the early days of the Empire, the fashions for both men and women were in many respects extravagant. The very elegant young men were known as _muscadins_ and _incroyables_ (incredibles) from their favorite expression,--all the _r_'s being banished from their speech: "_En véité, c'est incoyable!_" But it was not always safe to laugh at them; in 1795, the black collar which the aristocrats substituted for the former green one, in sign of mourning, gave rise to many difficulties and altercations. In the midst of the Palais-Royal a republican received a bullet point-blank in his chest in return for an insult. Another, meeting one of these _collets noirs_, said to him: "B . . . of a Chouan, for whom dost thou wear mourning?" "For thee!" replied the other, and blew out his brains. When Napoleon came into power, there arose that misdirected imitation of the antique known as the style of the Empire, with a great display of jewelry on the costumes of both men and women; "the aristocracy of the French Empire presented a revival of the ostentatious patricians of Rome under the Cæsars. The toilettes displayed were rich and magnificent, but it must be said that they were in bad taste."

The contempt which the members of the somewhat effete aristocracy of the _ancien régime_ manifested, even down to the period of the Second Empire, for the virile and fire-new nobility of Napoleon's family, generals and marshals, was generally as puerile as it was unpatriotic, but the latter only too frequently presented subject for sarcasm. In one of the most recent of the many Napoleonic memoirs, those of the Comtesse Potocka, this lively Polish lady describes the great personages who surrounded the Emperor in the winter of 1806-1807, at Warsaw: Murat, parading himself in the salons "with the majestic air of a comedian assuming the rôle of a king;" the young Prince Borghèse, "who, in the brief intervals when the conversation became _a little_ serious, went off to get some chairs, arranged them in pairs in the middle of the salon, and amused himself by dancing contra-dances with these silent partners, humming to himself." Three years later, in Paris, Madame Potocka saw the new Empress, Marie-Louise, whose dull countenance and German accent sufficiently accounted for her personal unpopularity.

Napoleon, who did not hesitate to qualify contemptuously the public opinion of Paris when it was adverse to him, was not above the ancient "bread and circus" methods of the Roman emperors at times. On the occasion of the celebration of his coronation, there were distributed to the populace thirteen thousand poultry, bread, and wine ran freely in the public squares, so that the streets echoed to this cheerful refrain:

"_Vive, vive Napoléon,
Qui nous bâille
D' la volaille,
Du pain et du vin à foison.
Vive, vive Napoléon!_"

(who gives us chickens, bread, and wine in abundance.)

As for Joséphine, her pretty legend has quite disappeared in the light of these recent memoirs, and the historians and commentators no longer attempt to defend her against even the abominable stories which Barras tells of her. "It would be Don-quixotism to deny them," says M. Gustave Larroumet, among others; "the Joséphines prefer the Barras to the Bonapartes."

The marriage with Joséphine was declared null, in virtue of an order of the Council of Trent on the 14th of January, 1810, and Napoleon was condemned by the municipality of Paris to a fine of six francs for the benefit of the poor. The curious engraving, reproduced on page 123, illustrates the brilliant ceremony of the arrival of the new Empress at the Tuileries on the 2d of April following. A tremendous storm broke over the city the night before, but at one o'clock in the afternoon, when the Imperial couple arrived at the Arch of Triumph, then incomplete but represented by a temporary _maquette_, the sun was shining brightly. The cavalry of the Guard and the heralds-at-arms preceded the gorgeous coronation carriage in which they were seated; the procession descended the avenue of the Champs-Élysées, traversed the gardens of the Tuileries, and halted before the Pavillon de l'Horloge. Then the Empress assumed the coronation robe, the cortége ascended the grand stairway, traversed the grand gallery of the Louvre between a double row of invited guests, and entered the Salon Carré, which had been transformed into a chapel, and where the nuptial altar had been erected. After the mass, there was a _Te Deum_, and in the evening a grand banquet in the Tuileries. The musicians sang the chorus of the _Iphigénie_ of Gluck: _Que d'attraits, que de majesté!_ to the accompaniment of thousands of voices.

_La Femme_ has always played a most important role in France; nowhere is she so much discussed, nowhere is she so much respected as Mother, and nowhere, it may be said, is she so little respected as Woman. The women of the eighteenth century enjoy a species of popular renown as somewhat more _piquant_, brilliant, and peculiarly feminine, as it were,--thanks largely to the chroniclers and the romancers in literature and art; there is a very general idea that they were all, more or less, of the type of Madame de Pompadour, we will say, as set forth by one of her most recent biographers: "It would seem that the grace and the good taste of all the things of her time appertained to Madame de Pompadour. She marked with her _cachet_, it might almost be said with her arms, all that world of matter which seems to be animated from one end to the other by the ideal of the habits of a people, and the needs of a society. The whole century is like a great relic of the royal favorite.... She presides over that variety and that wide range of objects, so diverse in the universality of their type, that the eighteenth century created in her image to surround her existence, to serve her and to adorn her." This graceful and pleasing picture, however, was largely superficial in the case of her less favored sisters. The inevitable limitations of the life and of the times, the ignorance, the social prejudices, the inexplicable dissatisfaction which really haunted all things, all combined to undermine this brilliant social life, and there was a general consciousness of its hollowness.

"Under all this fever of fashion and customs, under all these dissipations of the imagination and the life, there remains something unappeased, unsatisfied, and empty in the heart of the woman of the eighteenth century. Her vivacity, her affectation, her eagerness to run after fancies, seem to be a disquietude; and a sickly impatience appears in this continual search for attraction, in this furious thirst for pleasure. She searches in every direction, as if she wished to expand herself outside of herself. But it is vainly that she displays her activity, that she seeks all around her a species of deliverance;--she may plunge herself, drown herself, in that which the fashion of the times designates as an 'ocean of worlds,' run after distractions, new faces, those passing liaisons, those accidental friends, for whom the century invents the word _connaissances_; dinners, suppers, fêtes, voyages of pleasure, tables always filled, salons always crowded, a continual passage of personages, variety of news, visages, masks, toilettes, absurdities, all this spectacle ceaselessly changing cannot entirely satisfy her with its distractions. Though all her nights are brilliant with candles, though she summon--as she grows older--more movement still around her, she ends always by falling back upon herself; she finds herself again in wishing to flee from herself, and she admits to herself secretly the suffering which devours her. She recognizes in herself the secret evil, the incurable evil which this century carries in itself and which it drags with it everywhere smiling,--_ennui_." (_La Femme au XVIIIe siècle._)

The very original methods employed by one of these clever ladies at the very beginning of the century to avoid this all-pervading weariness of the spirit furnished Théophile Gautier with the title and the theme of one of his best romances. _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ lived in the flesh of Mademoiselle d'Aubigny, offspring of a good family, who ran away from the paternal mansion at the age of fourteen and fell in love with a fencing-master who made of her a fighter of the very first order. Nothing that the most successful romancer could desire was wanting in her life,--abductions, disguises, duels, convents forced and set on fire: "Don Juan was only a commonplace fop in comparison with the incredible good fortunes of this terrible virago who changed her costume as she did her visage, courted, indifferently and always with the same success, one sex or the other, according as she was in an impulsive or a sentimental vein." She had a fine voice, became a member of the Opéra troupe under the name of _la Maupin_, and sang with success in the _Psyche_, the _Armide_, and the _Atys_ of Lully. One of her most famous duels ensued from her too assiduous attentions to a young lady one night at a ball at the Palais-Royal, in the last days of the reign of Louis XIV. The husband, the brother, and the lover all took up the quarrel, and were all three neatly run through the body, one after the other, in the snowy court-yard below. Then the victor, calm and smiling, returned to offer _his_ arm to the beauty.

Another of these epicene sworders, diplomat, publicist, and captain of dragoons, reader for the Empress Elizabeth of Russia, in the suite of Marie-Antoinette at Versailles, preserved the secret of his sex until his death. This was the adventurer D'Éon de Beaumont, whose career excited such a lively interest in both England and France, and who signed himself, in a letter addressed to Madame de Staël during the Revolution, _citoyenne de la nouvelle République française, citoyenne de l'ancienne République des lettres_.

On the 3d of May, 1814, a Bourbon king was again in the Tuileries. All the tremendous work of the Revolution and the Empire seemed undone. "Brusquely, without any transitions," says M. Henri Noël, "the standard of men and things was lowered many degrees. To the epopee succeeds the bourgeois drama, not to say the comedy. It would have been thought that France, satiated with glory and misfortunes, France, which, on the whole, seemed to have accepted without enthusiasm, but with a sort of resigned indifference, the new régime, was about to breathe again, to relax herself, to repose. She is wearied with herself. She is nervous, discontented. It might be said that she endured with less patience the blunders, the littleness, the errors of the royalty, than she had the tragic massacres, and the ruins, and the invasions, and the bloodshed, and the tears. Everywhere, anxiety and disquietude, the royalists not completely satisfied, the generals humiliated, the army without glory and its best officers retired on half-pay, the liberal bourgeoisie suspicious and disposed to join the opposition, the small land-owners anxious for their property which they had received from the Revolution...."

Louis XVIII, with all his inherent faults, was a prudent and moderate ruler in comparison with his brother, the Comte d'Artois, who succeeded him as Charles X in September, 1824, and in six years brought the Bourbon dynasty to an end. M. Ernest Daudet, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, has recently been publishing some letters in connection with the ministry of the Duc Decazes, in one of which we find the king remonstrating with his brother, already the chief of the _ultras_: ... "You have notified me that, if you do not succeed in persuading me, you will make your opinions known publicly, and, which unfortunately will inevitably follow, that you will no longer see me.... There is no doubt that this resolution will seriously embarrass the government. But, with consistency and firmness, this obstacle may be overcome, and I hope that, during my lifetime, there will be no troubles. But I cannot, without a shudder, look forward to the moment when my eyes will be closed. You will then find yourself between two parties, one of which believes itself to be already oppressed by me, and the second of which will apprehend being so treated by you. (Conclusion: there will be civil war, and a whole future of divisions, of troubles, and of calamities.)"

This prophecy was but too well realized. The liberal ideas, which were made responsible, though without any proof, for the assassination of the Duc de Berri, at the door of the Opéra-house on the evening of the 13th of February, 1820, attained a great development in the ensuing reign. Paris was unanimous in its opposition. Decamps's absurd cartoon of Charles X hunting, which we have reproduced, is a not unfaithful presentation of the state of public opinion concerning this purblind monarch.

All these revolutions in the political world were, of course, followed in the, perhaps, minor world of fashion. _Souvent femme varie_, and _Toute passe, tout casse, tout lasse._ "Paris, in its revulsion from the severity of the earlier Revolution," says an unsympathetic English writer, "took refuge in the primitive license of the Greeks. 'It was a beautiful dress,' says a lady in a popular modern comedietta; 'I used to keep it in a glove-box.' The costume of a _belle_ of the _Directoire_ was equally portable.... With the triumph of the Empire, a more martial and masculine tone prevailed. So the _Parisienne_ cast off her Grecian robes--a comparatively easy process--and put on the whole armor of the tailor-made. She wore cloth instead of diaphanous gauze, and her gowns were cut with a more austere simplicity. Then came the Restoration and the Romantic movement, and the great days of 1830. Woman read her Chateaubriand and her Victor Hugo and her Byron, and became sentimental. It was _bon-ton_ to languish a good deal, and the dressmakers were required to find a suitable costume for the occupation. They proved equal to the demand.... In England, these vestments are called Early Victorian, and are scoffed at, together with the horse-hair sofas and glass lustres of the period.

"At any rate, it did not last. Nothing lasts in feminine fashions.... Romanticism and sentiment died out or became _bourgeois_. Gay Paris grew alert, lively, animated, dashing. The lady who used to be called a _lionne_ when people were reading Murger and De Musset, displaced the _femme incomprise_. The 'lioness' was not unlike the vigorous young person of a later epoch. She was distinctly loud in her manners and free and easy in her conversation.... At any rate, she was a healthier type than the pleasure-loving matron of the Second Empire, whose life was one whirl of unwholesome excitement. The vulgarity of thought and conduct, the destruction of all standards of dignity, which characterized the régime of Louis Napoleon's stock-jobbing adventurers, were reflected in the dress of the women. Never was female attire more extravagantly absurd.... Man, with all his tolerance, could not really like the Paris fashions of the Second Empire, and he might have found consolation for the tragedies of 1870, if he had known, as has been asserted, that they portended deliverance from the thraldom. France, so we are told, purged and purified by the baptism of fire, shook off its tasteless frippery, and sought a chaster and purer mode.... Thus elevated and touched to higher issues, the _modistes_ of France, when once the Third Republic had settled down, made quite nice and simple dresses for a few years, and were imitated by the slavish islanders across the Channel, who had no such lofty motives to inspire them. The latest developments of this philosophy of clothes are not yet worked out in detail...."

A multitude of the _emigré_ nobles returned with Louis XVIII, bringing with them the manners and customs of the _ancien régime_, which the Parisians found singularly antiquated and absurd, and gave these reactionaries the title of _Voltigeurs de Louis XVI_. The science of good cooking, however, which had been somewhat neglected by society during the Empire, suddenly took on a much greater importance--as was its due. The lady of the higher aristocracy, taking her déjeuner so comfortably with her lapdog, in the plate which we have reproduced from the _Bon Genre_, is supposed to be the Princesse de Vaudémont. A curious detail of the social life of the Romantic period of the Restoration was the fashion of _keepsakes_ and _annuaires illustrés_, which came from England, and which flourished from 1825 to 1845. These costly little books intended for presentation, richly bound, and illustrated with small steel engravings, generally taken from the English "keepsakes," bore various titles: _L'Album brittanique_, _L'Amaranthe, Annales romantiques_, _Le Camée_, _La Corbeille d'or_, _L'Eglantine_, _L'Élite_, _Livre des salons_, etc. The greatest names among the writers of the _Romantisme_ may be found among the contributors to these publications,--Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, A. de Vigny, Méry, Gozlan, and others.

The _bourgeois_ monarchy of Louis-Philippe was made the object of a storm of ridicule on the part of the Parisian wits and caricaturists from which it has never entirely recovered. The "umbrella" of the Orléans family, which the ribald press of that day made the emblem of their royalty, still figures in the lampoons addressed to the present pretender. The caricature of the royal physiognomy as a pear is one of the most famous in history. Louis-Philippe wore his hair piled in a species of pyramid over his forehead, which lent plausibility to this defamation; this pyramid was known as the _toupet_, and was naturally largely imitated; those whose locks were not sufficient in quantity for the purpose, purchased false ones. Whiskers were also in fashion, but not moustaches, and no official functionary was permitted to wear hair under his nose. The _Saint-Simoniens_ and those who entitled themselves _Jeune France_ alone wore the hair long and pendant, and the toupet gradually lowered its altitude and finally disappeared, to give place to hair smoothed down and parted strongly on one side, generally the left.

After the Revolution of 1830, the Tuileries gardens were thrown open to all decently-dressed people, but not to those in blouses; it required another revolution, that of 1848, to bring about sufficient toleration to recognize the privilege of smoking under these ci-devant royal horse-chestnuts. A Legitimist journal, regretting the good old days, before the populace were accorded the privilege of entry, "which gives to this locality much the appearance of Noah's ark, in which both the clean and the unclean beasts were admitted," related the following anecdote of the days of the monarchy. A young man of the _suprême bon ton_, carefully arrayed in the very latest modes, a _petit-maître_ [dandy, fop, exquisite], presented himself at one of the entrances of the garden and was much surprised to see the sentry on duty lower his bayonet and forbid his passing. "How! no admittance?" exclaimed the beau. "I have precise orders," replied the soldier. "Precise orders ... to refuse me?" "Precise orders to refuse any one whom I consider to be badly dressed [_mal mis_]; ... now, I consider you to be _bien mal mis_." And the young man was compelled to retire before this new censor of manners armed with authority.

In 1845, the _prestidigitateur_, Robert-Houdin, appeared at the Palais-Royal with his new species of entertainment, and for a number of years continued to delight numerous audiences with his mystifying skill in sleight of hand, his example being followed by minor practitioners who gave performances in private salons. The theatre bearing his name on the Boulevard des Italiens still maintains this class of popular amusement.

On the 13th of July, 1842, the Duc d'Orléans, the heir to the throne, and a prince deservedly popular, was thrown from his carriage on the Rue de la Révolte, while on his way to Neuilly, and so badly injured that he died five hours later, universally lamented. The right of succession passed to his son, the Comte de Paris, then a child of four; and both Legitimists and Republicans began to look forward to the inevitable feebleness and uncertainty of a regency as favorable to the triumph of their ideas. The opposition of the king's minister, Guizot, the historian, to the electoral reforms is generally considered as having brought about the Revolution of 1848, though it is somewhat doubtful if the monarchy could have successfully weathered the storms of this year of liberal ideas and universal unrest.

Nevertheless, the Republic came too soon, as the French historians now seem disposed to admit. The political education of the nation was not yet sufficiently advanced, and "it returned to the Empire as to a solution that best conformed with its condition of _esprit simpliste_. This movement was accelerated by the combinations of men of all shades of political beliefs,--Berryer, Montalembert, Molé, Thiers, Odilon Barrot, and others, who counted on 'the pretended incapacity' of the future emperor for sliding into power themselves. But their hopes were disappointed by the taciturn pretender." One of the latest apologists for the Emperor, M. Thirria, in his _Napoléon III avant l'Empire_, claims, and no intelligent commentator can disprove the claim: "If he reigned, it was because France was willing, and very willing, and his fatal politics of nationalities, she approved of it, sanctioned it, the republican party first of all." M. Thirria is willing to admit, however, that "he was not made to be the chief of a State, and his reign was a great misfortune for France."

Having the courage of his convictions, M. Thirria does not hesitate to take up all the charges against the Emperor, beginning with the first of all, chronologically, that he was not the son of his alleged father. By a number of letters which he quotes from Louis-Napoleon, King of Holland, he endeavors to demonstrate that the latter considered himself to be, without doubt, the parent of Charles-Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. The story of the Dutch Admiral Verhuel is, however, corroborated by other documents of equal authenticity. The future emperor, it appears, did at one time officiate as an English police officer, but it was only for the space of two months, and then as special constable at some Chartist meetings. After the affair at Strasbourg, he did accept fifteen thousand francs from the government of Louis-Philippe, which he had just attempted to overthrow, on condition that he should go to America.

A franker chronicler gives us further details. Under the title, _Madame Cornu et Napoléon III_, M. Eugène d'Eichthal published, in 1897, a number of fragments translated from a posthumous work, _Conservation_, by the English economist, Nassau Senior, who had been brought into contact with a large number of distinguished men of different countries. In 1854, he first met in a salon the wife of the French painter Sébastien Cornu, who was a goddaughter of Queen Hortense and had been a friend from childhood of Louis-Napoleon. She had been able to render him many services when he was a prisoner at Ham, and they had maintained a confidential correspondence even after the _Coup d'État_, which almost interrupted their friendship, Madame Cornu being a good republican. In the course of her acquaintance with the English gentleman, she gave him much information concerning the then ruler of the French nation, which he carefully set down, and which M. d'Eichthal translated for the benefit of his countrymen. On one occasion she said: "The mental faculties of Louis-Napoleon present many great superiorities and great deficiencies. He has neither originality nor invention. He neither knows how to reason nor to discuss. He has very few fixed or general principles, but he is a very keen observer, noting quickly the weaknesses and the stupidities of those around him. In the company of some persons with whom he feels at ease, his wit and his gaiety are delicious.

"There is an equal want of accord in his moral qualities. He is extremely mild and amiable; his friendships are durable, but his passions are not so. He has, in a high degree, decision, obstinacy, dissimulation, patience, and confidence in himself. He is not arrested by any scruples. That which we call a sense of good and evil, he calls prejudices...."

Installed in the Élysée as Prince-President in 1849, he began to prepare the way for the _Coup d'État_ and the zealous republicans saw with alarm the species of informal court which he was already gathering around him. To attract the members of the higher society, he instituted a series of weekly receptions; all the ground-floor of the palace, including three salons and a gallery, was thrown open, and there was added a light edifice connecting the main façade with the wall of the garden, facing on the Avenue de Marigny. A decree of the 4th of January, 1850, elevated the ex-king Jérôme, then governor of the Invalides, to the rank of marshal of France, by a mere exercise of the presidential authority. His term of office and that of the Assemblée both expired in 1852, with an interval of three months between them, but the violent measures of the 2d of December, 1851, made him president for a term of three years, and the constitution which he had proposed was ratified by the nation by a tremendous majority.

In the Tuileries, he re-established the etiquette of the First Empire, but the ceremonial of his court did not equal the state maintained under the Bourbons. The palace itself, at first, was a very uncomfortable residence. All the modern conveniences of a dwelling were wanting; Louis-Philippe, who had a numerous family, had divided several galleries into apartments, separated by corridors without windows, lit only by lamps which vitiated the air. The various floors of the building were connected by narrow, winding stairways, also lit only by lamps; one story had been made into two, each with low ceilings and with very little day-light, and in the garrets, where the domestics were lodged, the air was pestilential. There was no running-water in the various apartments, and it was necessary to carry it in every day in pitchers.

In the Musée Carnavelet may be seen an interesting collection of water-colors by Baron, portraits of ladies and important personages of the Imperial court in costumes of fancy-dress balls and tableaux vivants. There may be seen the Emperor in black coat and trousers, the Empress _en bohémienne_, the Princesse de Metternich _en diable noir_, Madame de Gortschakoff as Salammbô, the Marquise de Galliffet as an angel, the Comtesse Walewska as Diana, the Comtesse de Pourtales as a bayadère, the Marquis de Galliffet as a cock, the Baron de Heeckeren as a doge, etc.

A retrospective exhibition, a _Salon de la Mode_, was opened in Paris, in the Palais du Champ-de-Mars, in the spring and early summer of 1896, and furnished a very good compendium in little, not only of the changing manners and customs of the last century or two, the vicissitudes of the artistic spirit of the nation, but also of the varying fortunes with which the capital ruled in matters of taste, of fashion, and of luxury. Subject-matter for grave historians might be found in the various indications, direct and suggested, of the points of contact between the daily life of the eighteenth century and our own, as well as of the many divergences. Long before 1789, the Parisians of the _ancien régime_ were in the enjoyment of many of the modes, the whims, and the absurdities which constitute so large a part of the existence of their successors. They were even, almost, supplied with fashion magazines, the first of these very important publications to appear, the _Courrier de la Mode_, under Louis XV, in 1768, not being appreciated, and coming to an early end. In 1785, however, appeared the _Cabinet des Modes_, transformed in the following year into _Magasin des modes nouvelles françaises et anglaises_, for English fashions disputed the sovereignty with Parisian ones, and journals published on the banks of the Thames spoke with equal authority. Among these latter was the _Gallery of Fashion_, founded in 1794. The Germans, on the other hand, originated nothing, and the _Moden Zeitung_ of Berlin reproduced slavishly only that which had already been approved in Paris and London.

Much as in the present day, English tastes were followed in many things, not all of them feminine. The _Tableau de Paris_, published by Sébastien Mercier, lamented that "it is to-day the fashion among the youth to copy the English in their clothes." The large stores, the _magasins_, called themselves _anglais_; and the sport of horse-racing, which was beginning to be popular, and which was largely a matter of importation, naturally brought in alien words to shock the purists. The _jockei_ was sweated down to his proper weight to mount the _bête de sang_ [blooded animal]; _cheval de race_ was antiquated, and bad form. In the present day, there is a _Ligue d'honnêtes gens préoccupés de maintenir le bon français_, and who quote Béranger:

"_Redoutons l'Anglomanie,
Elle a déjà gâté tout._"

[Beware of Anglomania, it has already spoiled everything.] These "worthy people" admit that for such words as "jockey," "lawn-tennis," and "sport," for which there are no equivalents in the French language, there is some excuse, but why, they ask, is "turf" better than _pelouse_; "flirter," meaning "to flirt," than _fleureter_ (_conter fleurette_, to say pretty, gallant things); "garden-party" than _une partie de jardin_; "five o'clock" than _cinq heures_? Is "boarding-house" any more euphonious than _hôtel meublé_, or "tub" than _bassin_? Scarcely! Nevertheless, the English fashions, especially in men's garments, continue to enjoy great favor in Paris; and it may be noted, for the gratification of our national pride, that in some minor matters, such as shoes and ladies' stockings, the American articles are to be preferred to the Parisian ones.

All these futile and minor things, _toilettes_, _brimborions_, take on, a hundred years later, the importance of historic documents. "One would not go so far as to say," observes M. Bouchot, "that Napoleon was dethroned because it was found that the _fleur-de-lis_ made an adorable ornament for a _parure_ of crape, but is it such an absurd idea?" Under the reign of Louis XVI, it was proposed, more than once, to establish an _Académie de la Mode_, and an _Académie de la Coiffure_. A certain _citoyen amateur de sexe_, Lucas Rochemont, invented a concours, or competition, of new modes among the real _élégantes_ of France. It was the custom then to put forth small jokes against the Académie, just as it is now; it was declared that men of letters should renounce it and all its works, and that it preserved no better the purity of the language than it did that of taste. Nevertheless, it retained a certain respect, and the title, _Académie de Coiffure_, with which certain hair-dressers and wig-makers provided themselves, was forbidden.

The capital had long enjoyed the reputation, says the _Tableau de Paris_, of being "the paradise of women, the purgatory of men, the inferno of horses." The purgatory seems to have changed in two respects at least;--one could live in it then "comfortably enough at small expense," and the city was "highly indifferent concerning its political position." The horses were treated cruelly, even more so than at present, and the familiar jests concerning the fiacres were already invented. By this name was designated both the driver and his vehicle drawn "by an expiring horse." The _cochers_ enjoyed the same bad reputation they do at present--probably somewhat more justly, and they even went on strike, as in the nineteenth century. On one occasion, eighteen hundred of them drove out to Choisy, where the king was residing, to set their griefs before him. The streets were narrow and without sidewalks; the driver was held responsible only for the fore-wheels of his vehicle; and he naturally scattered terror as he went. The bicyclist and the automobile were not then invented to torment him in his turn. These two modern innovations have added very greatly to the danger and inconvenience of the streets of Paris of to-day; there are already complaints from the owners of private carriages that the Bois and the principal drives are becoming impossible because of the latter, and that the city will have to take measures to preserve its attractions for this class of inhabitants and for the wealthy stranger whose presence is so much desired within its walls.

Also, as at present, the washwomen were the despair of careful housekeepers. "There is no city where so much linen is used as at Paris, and none where it is so badly washed," says our authority. There was a legend of some _gommeux_ [dandies] from Bordeaux who sent theirs to Saint-Domingo, naturally, by sailing vessel, to have it whitened. _Homme à bonne fortune_ and _petit-maître_ were no longer in favor, _élégant_ was the proper appellation. The Seine water was drunk freely, but it had already begun to be analyzed and doubted; cremation was advocated and vivisection denounced; the classic education and Latin were derided, just as by M. Jules Lemaître; the evolution of the species was discussed, and the sorrowfulness of the Carnival lamented,--the police were even obliged to hire the maskers; the _claque_ was offensively in evidence at the theatres. The _grippe_ arrived periodically in the month of November, to the great surprise of every one,--but it was then called _la coquette_ and not _l'influenza_. The ladies pommaded their faces, and drank vinegar to preserve their figures; marriages were effected only in hopes of pecuniary advantages. The honest bourgeoisie complained bitterly of the display of licentious prints on the walls and the fronts of the bookstalls; "the young men in the cafés discussed matters which were beyond their comprehension and which they had never studied." There was a surprising number of points of resemblance.

Among the minor observances of social life which have come down to the present day with only some modification of details are the _billets de décès_ and the _invitations aux funérailles_. It is only since 1760 that the names of members of the mourning families have appeared on these invitations. In the matter of _avis de naissance_, in which the birth of a baby is announced, the moderns have made great improvements, some of the designs by the cleverest Parisian artists--as that by Willette reproduced on page 211--being quite charming. In the much more important matter of _Menus_, the prodigal display of invention is worthy of the most artistic of capitals. The luxury of the toilette is maintained with somewhat more discretion and less ostentation; many of the modern refinements, as that of the manicure, are but intelligent developments or modifications of the arts of the last century. Some of the social vices, as gambling and intoxication, have greatly decreased, notwithstanding the lamentations of such prophets of evil as M. Gaston Routier, and many of the more graceful forms of exercise, such as fencing--consult M. Koppay's spirited sketches--have grown greatly in favor.

The Second Empire contributed a very commendable example of luxury lending itself to the interests of history in the case of the restoration of a Pompeian house, erected by Prince Jérôme Napoleon in the Rue Montaigne, and formally opened with a reception at which the Emperor and Empress were present, February 14, 1860.