de Genlis, "Memoires," chap. 3 and 11.--De Goncourt, 114.]

[Footnote 2275: Bachaumont, III. 343 (February 23, 1768) and IV. 174,
III. 232.--"Journal d Colle," passim.--Colle, Laujon and Poisinet are
the principal purveyors for these displays; the only one of merit is
"La Verite dans le Vin." In this piece instead of "Mylord." there was
at first the "bishop of Avranches," and the piece was thus performed at
Villers-Cotterets in the house of the Duc d'Orleans.]

[Footnote 2276: Mme. d'Oberkirk, II. 82.--On the tone of the best
society see "Correspondance" by Metra, I. 50, III. 68, and Bezenval (Ed.
Barriere) 387 to 394.]

[Footnote 2277: Mme. de Genlis, "Adele et Theodore," II. 362.]

[Footnote 2278: George Sand, I. 85. "At my grandmother's I have found
boxes full of couplets, madrigals and biting satires.... I burned some
of them so obscene that I would not dare read them through, and these
written by abbes I had known to my infancy and by a marquis of the best
blood." Among other examples, toned down, the songs on the Bird and the
Shepherdess, may be read in "Correspondance," by Metra.]

CHAPTER III. DISADVANTAGES OF THIS DRAWING ROOM LIFE.

I.

Its Barrenness and Artificiality.--Return to Nature and
sentiment.

Mere pleasure, in the long run, ceases to gratify, and however agreeable
this drawing room life may be, it ends in a certain hollowness.
Something is lacking without any one being able to say precisely what
that something is; the soul becomes restless, and slowly, aided by
authors and artists, it sets about investigating the cause of its
uneasiness and the object of its secret longings. Barrenness and
artificiality are the two traits of this society, the more marked
because it is more complete, and, in this one, pushed to extreme,
because it has attained to supreme refinement. In the first
place naturalness is excluded from it; everything is arranged and
adjusted,--decoration, dress, attitude, tone of voice, words, ideas
and even sentiments. "A genuine sentiment is so rare," said M. de V--,
"that, when I leave Versailles, I sometimes stand still in the street
to see a dog gnaw a bone."[2301] Man, in abandoning himself wholly to
society, had withheld no portion of his personality for himself while
decorum, clinging to him like so much ivy, had abstracted from him the
substance of his being and subverted every principle of activity.

"There was then," says one who was educated in