There is always a trace of anarchy in renown.
Chateaubriand, had he entered there, would have produced the effect of Pere Duchene.
Some of the scoffed-at did, nevertheless, penetrate thither on sufferance.
Comte Beug*** was received there, subject to correction.
The “noble” salons of the present day no longer resemble those salons.
The Faubourg Saint-Germain reeks of the fagot even now.
The Royalists of to-day are demagogues, let us record it to their credit.
At Madame de T.‘s the society was superior, taste was exquisite and haughty, under the cover of a great show of politeness.
Manners there admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements which were the old regime itself, buried but still alive.
Some of these habits, especially in the matter of language, seem eccentric.
Persons but superficially acquainted with them would have taken for provincial that which was only antique.
A woman was called Madame la Generale.
Madame la Colonelle was not entirely disused.
The charming Madame de Leon, in memory, no doubt, of the Duchesses de Longueville and de Chevreuse, preferred this appellation to her title of Princesse.
The Marquise de Crequy was also called Madame la Colonelle.
It was this little high society which invented at the Tuileries the refinement of speaking to the King in private as the King, in the third person, and never as Your Majesty, the designation of Your Majesty having been “soiled by the usurper.”
Men and deeds were brought to judgment there.
They jeered at the age, which released them from the necessity of understanding it.
They abetted each other in amazement. They communicated to each other that modicum of light which they possessed.
Methuselah bestowed information on Epimenides.
The deaf man made the blind man acquainted with the course of things.
They declared that the time which had elapsed since Coblentz had not existed.
In the same manner that Louis XVIII. was by the grace of God, in the five and twentieth year of his reign, the emigrants were, by rights, in the five and twentieth year of their adolescence.
All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly amounted to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with the salons, seemed a papyrus.
There were some young people, but they were rather dead.
The liveries in the antechamber were antiquated.
These utterly obsolete personages were served by domestics of the same stamp.
They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and of obstinately resisting the sepulchre.
Nearly the whole dictionary consisted of Conserver, Conservation, Conservateur; to be in good odor,—that was the point.
There are, in fact, aromatics in the opinions of these venerable groups, and their ideas smelled of it.
It was a mummified society.
The masters were embalmed, the servants were stuffed with straw.
A worthy old marquise, an emigree and ruined, who had but a solitary maid, continued to say:
“My people.”
What did they do in Madame de T.‘s salon?
They were ultra.
To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not have disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day.
Let us explain it.
To be ultra is to go beyond.
It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne, and the mitre in the name of the altar; it is to ill-treat the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received by heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry; it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to discover that the Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the King is not sufficiently royal, and that the night has too much light; it is to be discontented with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.
The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase of the Restoration.
Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which begins in 1814 and terminates about 1820, with the advent of M. de Villele, the practical man of the Right.
These six years were an extraordinary moment; at one and the same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and sombre, illuminated as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at the same time, with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still filled the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past.
There existed in that light and that shadow, a complete little new and old world, comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was rubbing its eyes; nothing resembles an awakening like a return; a group which regarded France with ill-temper, and which France regarded with irony; good old owls of marquises by the streetful, who had returned, and of ghosts, the “former” subjects of amazement at everything, brave and noble gentlemen who smiled at being in France but wept also, delighted to behold their country once more, in despair at not finding their monarchy; the nobility of the Crusades treating the nobility of the Empire, that is to say, the nobility of the sword, with scorn; historic races who had lost the sense of history; the sons of the companions of Charlemagne disdaining the companions of Napoleon.
The swords, as we have just remarked, returned the insult; the sword of Fontenoy was laughable and nothing but a scrap of rusty iron; the sword of Marengo was odious and was only a sabre.
Former days did not recognize Yesterday.
People no longer had the feeling for what was grand.
There was some one who called Bonaparte Scapin.
This Society no longer exists.
Nothing of it, we repeat, exists to-day.