y, and another the next. His jockey stands behind his cabriolet in
top-boots, and his coachman wears a grand fur coat in summer. His own
clothes are always new, sometimes in the most accurate type of a groom,
sometimes in that of a dandy. His talk is of steeple-chases.'

'And does he get on?' I asked.

'Not in the least,' answered Beaumont. 'In England a _nouveau riche_ can
get into Parliament, or help somebody else to get in, and political power
levels all distinctions. Here, wealth gives no power: nothing, indeed,
but office gives power. The only great men in the provinces are the
_prefet_, the _sous-prefet_, and the _maire_. The only great man in Paris
is a minister or a general. Wealth, therefore, unless accompanied by the
social talents, which those who have made their fortunes have seldom had
the leisure or the opportunity to acquire, leads to nothing. The women,
too, of the _parvenus_ always drag them down. They seem to acquire
the _tournure_ of society less easily than the men. Bastide, when
Minister, did pretty well, but his wife used to sign her invitations
"Femme Bastide."

'Society,' he continued, 'under the Republic was animated. We had great
interests to discuss, and strong feelings to express, but perhaps the
excitement was too great. People seemed to be almost ashamed to amuse
or to be amused when the welfare of France, her glory or her degradation,
her freedom or her slavery, were, as the event has proved, at stake.'

'I suppose,' I said to Ampere, 'that nothing has ever been better than
the _salon_ of Madame Recamier?'

'We must distinguish,' said Ampere. 'As great painters have many manners,
so Madame Recamier had many _salons_. When I first knew her, in 1820, her
habitual dinner-party consisted of her father, her husband, Ballanche,
and myself. Both her father, M. Bernard, and her husband were agreeable
men. Ballanche was charming.'

'You believe,' I said, 'that Bernard was her father?' 'Certainly I do,'
he replied. 'The suspicion that Recamier might be was founded chiefly on
the strangeness of their conjugal relations. To this, I oppose her
apparent love for M. Bernard, and I explain Recamier's conduct by his
tastes. They were coarse, though he was a man of good manners. He never
spent his evenings at home. He went where he could find more license.

'Perhaps the most agreeable period was at that time of Chateaubriand's
reign when he had ceased to exact a _tete-a-tete_, and Ballanche and I
wer