full of generosity, prosaic people full of
poetry, and mediocre people full of genius: the brief carnival-week
of the old world, when men and women masqueraded in all manner of
outlandish and antiquated thoughts and feelings, and enjoyed the
excitement of dressing-up so much that they actually believed themselves
for the moment to be what they pretended: it was the brief moment,
grotesque and pathetic, when the doomed classes of society, who were
fatally going to be exterminated for their long selfishness and
indifference, enthusiastically caught up pick-axe and shovel and tore
down the bricks of the edifice which was destined to fall and to crush
them all beneath its ruins.

All these men and women, their deep in-born corruption momentarily
transfigured by this enthusiasm for liberty, for equality, for sentiment,
for austerity, which mingled oddly with their childish pleasure in all
new things, in mesmerism, in America, in electricity, in Montgolfier
balloons, with their habitual pleasure in all their big and small futile
and wicked pleasures of worldliness;--all these men and women, these
_morituri_ delighted at the preparations, the scaffoldings, red clothes,
black crape, torches and drums and bugles, for their own execution, all
assembled at that hotel of the Rue de Bourgoyne.

A brilliant crowd of ministers and diplomatists, and artists and
pamphleteers, and wits and beautiful women; perishable and perished
things, out of which we must select one or two, either as types of that
which has perished, or as types of the imperishable; and the perished,
the amiable and beautiful women, the amusing and brilliantly-improvising
orators and philosophers of the half-hour, are often that which, could
we have chosen, we should have preserved. Most notable among the women,
the young daughter of Necker, the wife of the Swedish ambassador, Mme.
la Baronne de Stael Holstein: a rather mannish superb sort of creature,
with shoulders and arms compensating for thick swarthy features; eyes
like volcanoes; the laugh of the most kind-hearted of children; the
stride, the attitude, with her hands for ever behind the back, of an
unceremonious man; a young woman already accounted a genius, and felt to
be a moral force. Next to her a snub, drab-coloured Livonian, with
northern eyes telling of future mysticism, that Mme. de Kruedener, as yet
noted only for the droll contrast of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and
the simplicity of nature with he