ld 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 hat[2] 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
