n'aime pas le bal. Elle
n'aime pas le monde, elle y ira seulement pour plaire a sa mere." I try
sometimes to escape from these generalities, but there is nothing behind
them.'

'And how long,' I asked, 'does this simple, pious, retiring character
last?'

'Till the orange flowers of her wedding chaplet are withered,' he
answered. 'In three months she goes to the _messe d'une heure_.'

'What is the "messe d'une heure?"' I asked.

'A priest,' he answered, 'must celebrate Mass fasting; and in strictness
ought to do so before noon. But to accommodate fashionable ladies who
cannot rise by noon, priests are found who will starve all the morning,
and say Mass in the afternoon. It is an irregular proceeding, though
winked at by the ecclesiastical authorities. Still to attend it is rather
discreditable; it is a middle term between the highly meritorious
practice of going to early Mass, and the scandalous one of never going at
all.'

'What was the education,' I asked, 'of women under the _ancien regime_?'

'The convent,' he answered.

'It must have been better,' I said, 'than the present education, since
the women of that time were superior to ours.'

'It was so far better,' he answered, 'that it did no harm. A girl at that
time was taught nothing. She came from the convent a sheet of white
paper. _Now_ her mind is a paper scribbled over with trash. The women of
that time were thrown into a world far superior to ours, and with the
sagacity, curiosity, and flexibility of French women, caught knowledge
and tact and expression from the men.

'I knew well,' he continued, 'Madame Recamier. Few traces of her former
beauty then remained, but we were all her lovers and her slaves. The
talent, labour, and skill which she wasted in her _salon_, would have
gained and governed an empire. She was virtuous, if it be virtuous to
persuade every one of a dozen men that you wish to favour him, though
some circumstance always occurs to prevent your doing so. Every friend
thought himself preferred. She governed us by little distinctions, by
letting one man come five minutes before the others, or stay five minutes
after. Just as Louis XIV. raised one courtier to the seventh heaven by
giving him the _bougeoir_, and another by leaning on his arm, or taking
his shirt from him.

'She said little, but knew what each man's _fort_ was, and placed from
time to time a _mot_ which led him to it. If anything were peculiarly
well said, her face brigh