ent upon sending an
apology to Madame Real. My friend, however, assured me that I should
meet in her salon persons of all classes and of all ranks, and many I
little expected to see associating together. I went late, and found the
assembly very numerous; at the upper part of the hall were seated
Princesses Joseph and Louis Bonaparte, with Madame Fouche, Madame
Roederer, the cidevant Duchesse de Fleury, and Marquise de Clermont. They
were conversing with M. Mathew de Montmorency, the contractor (a
ci-devant lackey) Collot, the ci-devant Duc de Fitz-James, and the
legislator Martin, a ci-devant porter: several groups in the several
apartments were composed of a similar heterogeneous mixture of ci-devant
nobles and ci-devant valets, of ci-devant Princesses, Marchionesses,
Countesses and Baronesses, and of ci-devant chambermaids, mistresses and
poissardes. Round a gambling-table, by the side of the ci-devant Bishop
of Autun, Talleyrand, sat Madame Hounguenin, whose husband, a ci-devant
shoeblack, has, by the purchase of national property, made a fortune of
nine millions of livres--L375,000. Opposite them were seated the
ci-devant Prince de Chalais, and the present Prince Cambaceres with the
ci-devant Comtesse de Beauvais, and Madame Fauve, the daughter of a
fishwoman, and the wife of a tribune, a ci-devant barber. In another
room, the Bavarian Minister Cetto was conferring with the spy Mehee de la
Touche; but observed at a distance by Fouche's secretary, Desmarets, the
son of a tailor at Fontainebleau, and for years a known spy. When I was
just going to retire, the handsome Madame Gillot, and her sister, Madame
de Soubray, joined me. You have perhaps known them in England, where,
before their marriage, they resided for five years with their parents,
the Marquis and Marquise de Courtin; and were often admired by the
loungers in Bond Street. The one married for money, Gillot, a ci-devant
drummer in the French Guard, but who, since the Revolution, has, as a
general; made a large fortune; and the other united herself to a
ci-devant Abbe, from love; but both are now divorced from their husbands,
who passed them without any notice while they were chatting with me. I
was handing Madame Gillot to her carriage, when, from the staircase,
Madame de Soubray called to us not to quit her, as she was pursued by a
man whom she detested, and wished to avoid. We had hardly turned round,
when Mehee offered her his arm, and she exclaime