t table, and her Tuesday and
Thursday dinners: at her rooms the masters of literature and music had
been wont to meet. Now came Buffon the naturalist; Bailly of Tennis
Court oath fame; Clootz, the friend of humanity. The widow of
Helvetius, with her many memories of Franklin, welcomed Volney, author
of the _Ruins of Empires_, and Chamfort, the candid critic of
Academicians. At the salon of Madame Pancroute, Barrere, the glib
orator of the Revolution, was the chief figure.

[Footnote 173: Mlle Curchod, for whom Gibbon "sighed as a lover but
renounced as a son."]

Julie Talma was famed for her literary and artistic circle. Here Marie
Joseph Chenier, the revolutionary dramatic poet of the Comedie
Francaise, declaimed his couplets. Here came Vergniaud, the eloquent
chief of the ill-fated Gironde; Greuze, the painter; Roland, the stern
and minatory minister, who spoke bitter words, composed by his wife,
to the king; Lavoisier, the chemist, who is said to have begged that
the axe might be stayed while he completed some experiments, and was
told that the Republic had no lack of chemists. Madame du Deffand,
whose hotel in the Rue des Quatre Fils still exists, welcomed
Voltaire, D'Alembert, Montesquieu and the Encyclopedists.

In the street, the great open-air salon of the people, was a feverish
going to and fro. Here were the tub-thumpers of the Revolution holding
forth at every public place; the strident voices of ballad-singers at
the street corners; hawkers of the latest pamphlets hot from the Quai
des Augustins; the sellers of journals crying the _Pere Duchesne_,
_L'Ami du Peuple_, the _Jean Bart_, the _Vieux Cordelier_. Crowds
gathered round Bassett's famous shop for caricature at the corner of
the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue des Mathurins. The walls of Paris were
a mass of variegated placards and proclamations. The charming signs of
the old _regime_, the Pomme rouge, the Rose Blanche, the Ami du
Coeur, the Gracieuse, the Trois Fleurs-de-lys Couronnees gave place
to the "Necker," the "National Assembly," the "Tiers," the
"Constitution"--these, too, soon to be effaced by more Republican
appellations. For on the abolition of the monarchy and the
inauguration of the Religion of Nature, the words "royal" and "saint"
disappear from the revolutionary vocabulary. A new calendar is
promulgated: streets and squares are renamed: Rues des Droits de
l'Homme, de la Revolution, des Piques, de la Loi, efface the old
landmarks. We mus