ear, a magnificent residence, and a sumptuous train of
servants--well, such a duke could live like a great lord. The last of
these great gentlemen in France was the Prince de Talleyrand.--This duke
leaves four children, two of them girls. Granting that he has great luck
in marrying them all well, each of these descendants will have but sixty
or eighty thousand francs a year now; each is the father or mother of
children, and consequently obliged to live with the strictest economy in
a flat on the ground floor or first floor of a large house. Who knows
if they may not even be hunting a fortune? Henceforth the eldest son's
wife, a duchess in name only, has no carriage, no people, no opera-box,
no time to herself. She has not her own rooms in the family mansion, nor
her fortune, nor her pretty toys; she is buried in trade; she buys socks
for her dear little children, nurses them herself, and keeps an eye on
her girls, whom she no longer sends to school at a convent. Thus your
noblest dames have been turned into worthy brood-hens."

"Alas! it is true," said Joseph Bridau. "In our day we cannot show
those beautiful flowers of womanhood which graced the golden ages of the
French Monarchy. The great lady's fan is broken. A woman has nothing now
to blush for; she need not slander or whisper, hide her face or reveal
it. A fan is of no use now but for fanning herself. When once a thing is
no more than what it is, it is too useful to be a form of luxury."

"Everything in France has aided and abetted the 'perfect lady,'" said
Daniel d'Arthez. "The aristocracy has acknowledged her by retreating
to the recesses of its landed estates, where it has hidden itself to
die--emigrating inland before the march of ideas, as of old to foreign
lands before that of the masses. The women who could have founded
European _salons_, could have guided opinion and turned it inside out
like a glove, could have ruled the world by ruling the men of art or
of intellect who ought to have ruled it, have committed the blunder of
abandoning their ground; they were ashamed of having to fight against
the citizen class drunk with power, and rushing out on to the stage of
the world, there to be cut to pieces perhaps by the barbarians who are
at its heels. Hence, where the middle class insist on seeing princesses,
these are really only ladylike young women. In these days princes can
find no great ladies whom they may compromise; they cannot even confer
honor on a wo