lous or very serious about the woman
of the Restoration. She was hypocritical as a rule in her passion, and
compounded, so to speak, with its pleasures. Some few families led
the domestic life of the Duchesse d'Orleans, whose connubial couch was
exhibited so absurdly to visitors at the Palais Royal. Two or three kept
up the traditions of the Regency, filling cleverer women with something
like disgust. The great lady of the new school exercised no influence at
all over the manners of the time; and yet she might have done much.
She might, at worst, have presented as dignified a spectacle as
English-women of the same rank. But she hesitated feebly among old
precedents, became a bigot by force of circumstances, and allowed
nothing of herself to appear, not even her better qualities.

Not one among the Frenchwomen of that day had the ability to create a
salon whither leaders of fashion might come to take lessons in taste and
elegance. Their voices, which once laid down the law to literature, that
living expression of a time, now counted absolutely for nought. Now
when a literature lacks a general system, it fails to shape a body for
itself, and dies out with its period.

When in a nation at any time there is a people apart thus constituted,
the historian is pretty certain to find some representative figure,
some central personage who embodies the qualities and the defects of the
whole party to which he belongs; there is Coligny, for instance, among
the Huguenots, the Coadjuteur in the time of the Fronde, the Marechal de
Richelieu under Louis XV, Danton during the Terror. It is in the nature
of things that the man should be identified with the company in which
history finds him. How is it possible to lead a party without conforming
to its ideas? or to shine in any epoch unless a man represents the ideas
of his time? The wise and prudent head of a party is continually obliged
to bow to the prejudices and follies of its rear; and this is the
cause of actions for which he is afterwards criticised by this or that
historian sitting at a safer distance from terrific popular explosions,
coolly judging the passion and ferment without which the great struggles
of the world could not be carried on at all. And if this is true of
the Historical Comedy of the Centuries, it is equally true in a more
restricted sphere in the detached scenes of the national drama known as
the _Manners of the Age_.

At the beginning of that ephemeral li