The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 10, August, 1858

To begin, then, with Mme. Lebrun. This lady was precisely one of those individualities who, since the days of Louis XIV., had found it easy to take their place in French society, who, under the ancien régime, were the equals of the whole world, and who, since "Equality" has been so formally decreed by the laws of the land, would have found it impossible, under the Citizen King, Louis Philippe, or under the so-called "Democratic Empire" of Louis Napoleon, to surround themselves with any society save that of a perfectly inferior description.

Mme. Lebrun was the daughter of a very second-rate painter of the name of Vigée, the sister of a poet of some talent of the same name, and was married young to a picture-dealer of large fortune and most expensive and dissipated, not to say dissolute habits, M. Lebrun. She was young,–and, like Mme. Récamier and a few others, remained youthful to a very late term of her existence,–remarkably beautiful, full of talent, grace, and esprit, and possessed of the magnificent acquirements as a portrait-painter that have made her productions to this day valuable throughout the galleries of Europe. She was very soon so brilliantly in fashion, that there was not a grand seigneur of the court, a grande dame of the queen's intimacy, a rich fermier-général, or a famous writer, artist, or savant, who did not petition to be admitted to her soirées; and in her small apartment, in the Rue de Cléry, were held probably the last of those intimate and charmingly unceremonious réunions which so especially characterized the manners of the high society of France when all question of etiquette was set aside. The witty Prince de Ligne, the handsome Comte de Vaudreuil, the clever M. de Boufflers, and his step-son, M. de Sabran, with such men as Diderot, d'Alembert, Marmontel, and Laharpe, were the original habitués of Mme. Lebrun's drawing-room. At the same time used to visit her the bitter, bilious, discontented David, the painter, who, though very young, was annoyed at a woman having such incontestable proficiency in his own art, and whose democratic ideas were hurt at her receiving such a number of what he styled "great people." Madame Lebrun, one day,–little dreaming that she was addressing a future coupe-tête of the most violent species, (perhaps the only genuine admirer of Marat,)–said, smilingly, to the future painter of Les Sabines, "David, you are wretched because you are neither Duke nor Marquis. I, to whom all such titles are absolutely indifferent, I receive with sincere pleasure all who make themselves agreeable." The apostrophe apparently hit home, for David never returned to Mme. Lebrun's house, and was no well-wisher of hers in later times. But on this occasion she had not only told the truth to an individual, she had touched upon the secret sore of the nation and the time; and vast classes were already brooding in silence over the absurd, vain, and empty regret at being "neither Duke nor Marquis." The Revolution was at hand, and the days rapidly approaching when all such pleasant assemblies as those held by Mme. Lebrun would become forever impossible. At some of these, the crowd of intimates, and of persons all acquainted with each other, was so great, that the highest dignitaries of the realm had to content themselves with sitting down upon the floor; and on one occasion, the Maréchal de Noailles, who was of exceedingly large build, had to request the assistance of several of his neighbors before he could be brought from his squatting attitude to his feet again.

Mme. Lebrun emigrated, like the majority of her associates,–going to Russia, to Italy, to Germany, to England, and everywhere increasing the number of her friends, besides preserving all those of former times, whom she sedulously sought out in their voluntary exile, and to whom, in many cases, she even proved an invaluable friend. In the commencement of the Restoration, Mme. Lebrun returned to France, and established herself definitively at Paris, and at Louveciennes near Marly, where she had a delightful summer residence. Here, as in her salons in the metropolis, she tried to bring back the tone of French society to what it had been before the Revolution, and to show the younger generations what had been the gayety, the grace, the affability, the exquisite good-breeding of those who had preceded them. The men and women of her own standing seconded her, but the younger ones were not to be drawn into high-heartedness; and an observer might have had before him the somewhat strange spectacle of old age gay, gentle, unobservant of any stiff formality, and of youth preoccupied and grave, and, instead of being refined in manners, pedantic. "The younger frequenters of Mme. Lebrun's salon," says Mme. Ancelot, "were strangers to the world into which they found themselves raised; those who surrounded them were of an anterior civilization; they could not grow to be identified with a past which was unknown to them, or known only through recitals that disfigured it.... Amidst the remnants of a society that had been historical, there was, as it were, the breath of a spirit born of our days; new ideas, new opinions, new hopes, nay, even new recollections, were evident all around, and served to render social unity impossible; but, above all, what failed in this one particular centre was youth,–there were few or no young people." This was perfectly true; and Mme. Lebrun's salon is interesting only from the fact of its being the last, perhaps, in which French people of our day can have acquired a complete notion of what the Pre-Revolutionary salons of France were.

The evening réunions at the house of Gérard, the celebrated painter, were among the most famous features of the society of the Restoration. The gatherings at Mmes. de Duras's and de Montcalm's splendid hotels were all but exclusively political and diplomatic; whereas at Gérard's there was a mixture of these with the purely mundane and artistic elements, and, above all, there was a portion of Imperialist fame blended with all the rest, that was hard to be found anywhere else. Gérard, too, had painted the portraits of so many crowned heads, and been so much admitted into the intimacy of his royal models, that, whenever a foreigner of any note visited Paris, he almost immediately asked to be put in a way to be invited to the celebrated artist's Wednesday receptions. This was, to a certain degree, an innovation in regular French society; the French being most truly, as has been said, the "Chinese of Europe," and liking nothing less than the intermixture with themselves of anything foreign. But Gérard was one of those essentially superior men who are able to influence those around them, and bring them to much whereto no one else could have persuaded them. Gérard, like many celebrated persons, was infinitely superior to what he did. As far as what he did was concerned, Gérard, though a painter of great merit, was far inferior to two or three of whom France has since been justly proud; but in regard to what he was, Gérard was a man of genius, who had in many ways few superiors. Few men, even in France, have so highly deserved the reputation of un homme d'esprit. He was as spirituel as Talleyrand himself, and almost as clear-sighted and profound. Add to this that nothing could surpass the impression made by Gérard at first sight. He was strikingly like the first Napoleon, but handsomer; with the same purity of outline, the same dazzlingly lustrous eyes, full of penetration and thought, but with a certain sympathetic charm about his whole person that the glorious conqueror of Marengo and Dictator of Gaul never possessed.

Gérard was not entirely French; born in Rome in 1770, his father only was a native of France, his mother was an Italian; and from her he inherited a certain combination of qualities and peculiarities that at once distinguished him from the majority of his countrymen. Full of poetic fire and inspiration, there was in Gérard at the same time a strong critical propensity, that showed itself in his caustic wit and, sometimes, not unmalicious remarks. There was also a perpetual struggle in his character between reflection and the first impulse, and sometimes the étourderie of the French nature was suddenly checked by the caution of the Italian; but, take him as he was, he was a man in a thousand, and those who were in the habit of constantly frequenting his house affirm loudly and with the deepest regret, that they shall never "look upon his like again."

Gérard had built for himself a house in the Rue des Augustins, near the ancient church of St. Germain des Près; and there, every Wednesday evening, summer and winter, he received whatever was in any way illustrious in France, or whatever the other capitals of Europe sent to Paris, en passant. "Four small rooms," says Mme. Ancelot, "and a very small antechamber, composed the whole apartment. At twelve o'clock tea was served, with eternally the same cakes, over which a pupil of Gérard's, Mlle. Godefroy, presided. Gérard himself talked; his wife remained nailed to a whist-table, attending to nothing and to nobody. Evening once closed in, cards were the only occupation of Mme. Gérard."

From Mme. de Staël down to Mlle. Mars, from Talleyrand and Pozzo di Borgo down to M. Thiers, there were no celebrities, male or female, that, during thirty years, (from 1805 to 1835,) did not flock to Gérard's house, and all, how different soever might be their character or position, agreed in the same opinion of their host; and those who survive say of him to this day,–"Nothing in his salons announced that you were received by a great Artist, but before half an hour had elapsed you felt you were the guest of a distinguished Man; you had seen by a glance at Gérard's whole person and air that he was something apart from others,–that the sacred fire burned there!"

The regret felt for Gérard's loss by all who ever knew him is not to be told, and speaks as highly for those who cherished as for him who inspired it. His, again, was one of the salons (impossible now in France) where genius and social superiority, whether of birth or position, met together on equal terms. Without having, perhaps, as large a proportion of the old noblesse de cour at his house as had Mme. Lebrun, Gérard received full as many of those eminent personages whose political occupations would have seemed to estrange them from the world of mixed society and the Arts. This is a nuance to be observed. Under the Empire, hard and despotic as was the rule of Bonaparte, and anxious even as he was to draw round him all the aristocratic names that would consent to serve his government, there was–owing to the mere force of events and the elective origin of the throne–a strong and necessary democratic feeling, that assigned importance to each man according to his works. Besides this, let it be well observed, the first Empire had a strong tendency to protect and exalt the Arts, from its own very ardent desire to be made glorious in the eyes of posterity. Napoleon I. was, in his way, a consummate artist, a prodigiously intelligent metteur en scène of his own exploits, and he valued full as much the man who delineated or sang his deeds, as the minister who helped him to legislate, or the diplomatist who drew up protocols and treaties. The Emperor was a lover of noise and show, and his time was a showy and a noisy one. Bonaparte had, in this respect, little enough of the genuine Tyrant nature. Unlike his nephew, he loved neither silence nor darkness; he loved the reflection of his form in the broad noon of publicity, and the echo of his tread upon the sounding soil of popular renown. Could he have been sure that all free men would have united their voices in chanting his exploits, he would have made the citizens of France the freest in the whole world. Compression with him was either a mere preventive against or vengeance for detraction.

Now this publicity-loving nature was, we repeat, as much served by Art and artists as by politicians; nay, perhaps more; and for this reason artists stood high during the period of the Empire. Talma held a social rank that under no other circumstances could have been his, and a painter like Gérard could welcome to his house statesmen such as Talleyrand or Daru, or marshals of France, and princes even. We shall show, by-and-by, how this grew to be impossible later. At present we will recur to Mme. Ancelot for a really very true description of two persons who were among the habitués of the closing years of Gérard's weekly receptions, and one of whom was destined to universal celebrity: we allude to Mme. Gay, and her daughter, Delphine,–later, Mme. Girardin. Of these two, the mother, famous as Sophie Gay, was as thorough a remnant of the exaggerations and bad taste of the Empire as were the straight, stiff, mock-classical articles of furniture of the Imperialist hotels, or the or-moulu clocks so ridiculed by Balzac, on which turbaned Mamelukes mourned their expiring steeds. All the false-heroics of the literature of the Empire found their representative (their last one, perhaps) in Mme. Sophie Gay, and it has not been sufficiently remarked that she even transmitted a shade of all this to her daughter, in other respects one of the most sagacious spirits and one of the most essentially unconventional of our own day. A certain something that was not in harmony with the tone of contemporary writers here and there surprised you in Delphine de Girardin's productions, and, as Jules Janin once said, "One would think the variegated plumes of Murat's fantastic hat29 were sweeping through her brains!" This was her mother's doing. Delphine, who had never lived during one hour of the glory of the Empire, had, through the medium of her mother, acquired a slight tinge of its boursouflure; and had it not been for her own personal good taste, she would have been misled precisely by her strong lyrical aptitudes. Madame Gay found in Gérard's salon all the people she had best known in her youth, and she was delighted to have her early years recalled to her. Mme. Ancelot, who, like many of her country women, felt a marked antipathy for Madame Gay, has given a very true portrait of both mother and daughter.

"Many years after," she writes, "when these ladies were (through M. de Girardin) at the head of one of the chief organs of the Paris press, they were much flattered and courted; at the period I speak of" (about 1817-1825) "their position was far from brilliant, and Mme. Gay was far from popular. Every word that fell from her mouth, uttered in a sharp tone, and full of bitterness and envy, went to speak ill of others and prodigiously well of herself. She had a mania for titles and tuft-hunting, and could speak of no one under a marquis, a count, or a baron. Her daughter's beauty and talents caused her afterwards to be more generally admitted into society; but at this period she was avoided by most people."

Her daughter's beauty was certainly marvellous, and when, under the reign of Louis Philippe, American society had in Paris more than one brilliant representative and more than one splendid centre of hospitality, where all that was illustrious in the society of France perpetually flocked, we make no doubt many of our countrymen noticed, whether at theatre or concert or ball, the really queenlike air of Mme. de Girardin, and the exquisitely classic profile, which, enframed, as it were, by the capricious spirals of the lightest, fairest flaxen hair, resembled the outline of some antique statue of a Muse.

Delphine Gay and her mother were more the ornaments of the salon of the Duchesse d'Abrantès, perhaps, than of that of Gérard; and as the former continued open long after the latter was closed by death, not only the young girl, whose verses were so immensely in fashion during the Restoration, was one of the constant guests of Junot's widow, but she continued to be so as the wife of Émile de Girardin, the intelligent and enterprising founder of the newspaper "La Presse."

The salon of the Duchesse d'Abrantès was one of the first of a species which has since then found imitators by scores and hundreds throughout France. It was the salon of a person not in herself sufficiently superior or even celebrated to attract the genuine superiorities of the country without the accessory attractions of luxury, and not sufficiently wealthy to draw around her by her splendid style of receiving, and to disdain the bait held out to those she invited by the presence of great "lions." Gérard gave to his guests, at twelve o'clock at night, a cup of tea and "eternally the same cakes" all the year round; but Gérard was the type of the great honors rendered, as we have observed, to Art under the Empire, and to his house men went as equals, whose daily occupations made them the associates of kings. This was not the case with the Duchesse d'Abrantès. She had notoriety, not fame. Her "Mémoires" had been read all through Europe, but it is to be questioned whether anything beyond curiosity was satisfied by the book, and it certainly brought to its author little or none of that which in France stands in lieu even of fortune, but which is not easy to obtain, namely,–consideration.

The Duchesse d'Abrantès was rather popular than otherwise; she was even beloved by a certain number of persons; but she never was what is termed considérée,–and this gave to her salon a different aspect from that of the others we have spoken of. A dozen names could be mentioned, whose wearers, without any means of "entertaining" their friends, or giving them more than a glass of eau sucrée, were yet surrounded by everything highest and best in the land, simply because they were gens considérables, as the phrase went; but Mme. d'Abrantès, who more or less received all that mixed population known by the name of tout Paris, never was, we repeat, considérée.

The way in which Mme. Ancelot introduces her "friend," the poor Duchesse d'Abrantès, on the scene, is exceedingly amusing and natural; and we have here at once the opportunity of applying the remark we made in commencing these pages, upon Mme. Ancelot's truthfulness. She is the habituée of the house of Mme. d'Abrantès; she professes herself attached to the Duchess; yet she does not scruple to tell everything as it really is, nor, out of any of the usual little weaknesses of friendship, does she omit any one single detail that proves the strange and indeed somewhat "Bohemian" manner of life of her patroness. We, the readers of her book, are obviously obliged to her for her indiscretions; with those who object to them from other motives we have nothing to do.

Here, then, is the fashion in which we are introduced to Mme. la Duchesse d'Abrantès, widow of Marshal Junot, and a born descendant of the Comneni, Emperors of Byzantium.

Mme. Ancelot is sitting quietly by her fireside, one evening in October, (some short time after the establishment of the monarchy of July,) waiting to hear the result of a representation at the Théâtre Français, where a piece of her own is for the first time being performed. All at once, she hears several carriages stop at her door, a number of persons rush up the stairs, and she finds herself in the arms of the Duchesse d'Abrantès, who was resolved, as she says, to be the first to congratulate her on her success. The hour is a late one; supper is served, and conversation is prolonged into the "small hours." All at once Mme. d'Abrantès exclaims, with an explosion of delight,–"Ah! what a charming time is the night! one is so deliciously off for talking! so safe! so secure! safe from bores and from duns!" (on ne craint ni les ennuyeux ni les créanciers.')

Madame Ancelot affirms that this speech made a tremendous effect, and that her guests looked at each other in astonishment. If this really was the case, we can only observe that it speaks well for the Parisians of the epoch at which it occurred; for, assuredly, at the present day, no announcement of the kind would astonish or scandalize any one. People in "good society," nowadays, in France, have got into a habit of living from hand to mouth, and of living by expedients, simply because they have not the strength of mind to live out of society, and because the life of "the world" forces them to expenses utterly beyond what they have any means of providing for. However, we are inclined to believe that some five-and-twenty years ago this was in no degree a general case, and that Mme. d'Abrantès might perfectly well have been the first maitresse de maison to whom it happened.

"Alas!" sighs Mme. Ancelot, commenting upon her excellent friend's strange confidence,–"it was the secret of her whole life that she thus revealed to us in a moment of abandon,–the secret of an existence that tried still to reflect the splendors of the Imperial epoch, and that was at the same time perplexed and tormented by all the thousand small miseries of pecuniary embarrassment. There were the two extremes of a life that to the end excited my surprise. Grandeur! want!–between those two opposites oscillated every day of the last years of the Duchesse d'Abrantès; the exterior and visible portion of that life arranged itself well or ill, as it best could, in the middle,–now apparently colored by splendor, and now degraded by distress; but at bottom the existence was unvaryingly what I state."

Madame d'Abrantès, at the period of her greatest notoriety, occupied the ground-floor of a hotel in the Rue Rochechouart, with a garden, where dancing was often introduced upon the lawn. Some remnants of the glories of Imperialism were collected there, but the principal habitués were men of letters, artists, and young men who danced well! (les jeunes beaux qui dansaient bien!) That one phrase characterizes at once the ex-belle of the Empire, the contemporary of the sentimental Hortense de Beauharnais, and of the more than légère Pauline Borghése.

To the "new society of July" Mme. d'Abrantès was an object of great curiosity. "I dote on seeing that woman!" said Balzac, one evening, to Mme. Ancelot. "Only fancy! she saw Napoleon Bonaparte as a mere boy,–knew him well,–knew him as a young man, unknown,–saw him occupied, like anybody else, with the ordinary occurrences of every-day life; then she saw him grow, and grow, and rise, and throw the shadow of his name over the world. She seems to me somewhat like a canonized creature who should all at once come and recount to me the glories of paradise."

Balzac, it must be premised, was bitten just at this period by the Napoleon mania, and this transformed his inquisitive attachment for Mme. d'Abrantès into a kind of passion. It was at this period that he chose to set up in his habitation in the Rue Cassini a sort of altar, on which he placed a small statue of the Emperor, with these words engraved upon the pedestal:–

"Ce qu'il avait commencé par l'épée,Je l'achèverai par la plume!"

What particular part of the Imperial work this was that Balzac was to "complete by the pen" was never rightly discovered,–but for a time he had a sun-stroke for Napoleon, and his attachment for Mme. d'Abrantès partook of this influence.

One anecdote told by Mme. Ancelot proves to what a degree the union of "grandeur" and "want" she has alluded to went. "Mme. d'Abrantès," says her biographer of the moment, "was always absorbed by the present impression, whatever that might happen to be; she passed from joy to despair like a child, and I never knew any house that was either so melancholy or so gay." One evening, however, it would seem that the Hôtel d'Abrantès was gayer than usual. Laughter rang loud through the rooms, the company was numerous, and the mistress of the house in unparalleled high spirits. If the tide of conversation seemed to slacken, quickly Madame la Duchesse had some inimitable story of the ridicules of the ladies of the Imperial court, and the whole circle was soon convulsed at her stories, and at her way of telling them. The tea-table was forgotten. Generally, tea at her house was taken at eleven o'clock; but on this occasion, midnight was long past before it was announced, and before her guests assembled round the table. If our readers are curious to know why, here was the reason: All that remained of the plate had that very morning been put in pawn, and when tea should have been served it was found that tea-spoons were wanting! Whilst these were being sent for to the house of a friend who lent them, Madame la Duchesse took charge of her guests, and drowned their impatience in their hilarity.