a society that had been a real and not a fictive unity. Mme. Gérard--or we should rather say her husband, for she occupied herself little with her guests, whom the illustrious painter entertained--represents the period of the Empire, prolonging itself into the Restoration, and seeking by the immunities of talent and intelligence to bring the two _régimes_ to meet upon what might be termed neutral ground. Mme. d'Abrantès is the type of that last remnant of the half-heroic, half-sentimental epoch which tried to endure even after the first days of 1830, and of which certain verses of Delphine Gay, certain impossible portraits of invincible colonels, certain parts played by the celebrated Elleviou, and the Troubadourish "_Partant pour la Syrie_" of Queen Hortense, are emblematical. Mme. Récamier, although in date all but the contemporary of Mme. Lebrun, is, in her position of mistress of a _salon_, essentially the impersonation of a foible peculiar to the present day; she typifies the class of women who, in Paris, are absolutely absorbed by the thought of their _salons_, for whom to receive is to live, and who are ready to expire at the notion of any celebrity not being a frequenter of their tea-table. Mme. Nodier's--and here, as with Mme. Gérard, we must substitute the husband for the wife, and say Charles Nodier's--_salon_ was the menagerie whither thronged all the strange beings who, after the Revolution of July, fancied they had some special and extraordinary "call" in the world of Art. Nodier's receptions at the Arsenal represent the literary and artistic movement of 1830.
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 M
