Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 - Various
To begin, then, with Mme. Lebrun. This lady was precisely one of
those individualities who, since the days of Louis XIV., had found it
easy to take their place in French society, who, under the ancien
_regime_, were the equals of the whole world, and who, since
"Equality" has been so formally decreed by the laws of the land, would
have found it impossible, under the Citizen King, Louis Philippe, or
under the so-called "Democratic Empire" of Louis Napoleon, to surround
themselves with any society save that of a perfectly inferior
description.
Mme. Lebrun was the daughter of a very second-rate painter of the name
of Vigee, the sister of a poet of some talent of the same name, and
was married young to a picture-dealer of large fortune and most
expensive and dissipated, not to say dissolute habits, M. Lebrun. She
was young,--and, like Mme. Recamier and a few others, remained
youthful to a very late term of her existence,--remarkably beautiful,
full of talent, grace, and _esprit_, and possessed of the magnificent
acquirements as a portrait-painter that have made her productions to
this day valuable throughout the galleries of Europe. She was very
soon so brilliantly in fashion, that there was not a _grand seigneur_
of the court, a _grande dame_ of the queen's intimacy, a rich
_fermier-general_, or a famous writer, artist, or _savant_, who did
not petition to be admitted to her soirees; and in her small
apartment, in the Rue de Clery, were held probably the last of those
intimate and charmingly unceremonious reunions which so especially
characterized the manners of the high society of France when all
question of etiquette was set aside. The witty Prince de Ligne, the
handsome Comte de Vaudreuil, the clever M. de Boufflers, and his
step-son, M. de Sabran, with such men as Diderot, d'Alembert,
Marmontel, and Laharpe, were the original _habitues_ of Mme. Lebrun's
drawing-room. At the same time used to visit her the bitter, bilious,
discontented David, the painter, who, though very young, was annoyed
at a woman having such incontestable proficiency in his own art, and
whose democratic ideas were hurt at her receiving such a number of
what he styled "great people." Madame Lebrun, one day,--little
dreaming that she was addressing a future _coupe-tete_ of the most
violent species, (perhaps the only genuine admirer of Marat,)--said,
smilingly, to the future painter of _Les Sabines_, "David, you are
wretched because you are neither Duke nor Marquis. I, to whom all such
titles are absolutely indifferent, I receive with sincere pleasure all
who make themselves agreeable." The apostrophe apparently hit home,
for David never returned to Mme. Lebrun's house, and was no
well-wisher of hers in later times. But on this occasion she had not
only told the truth to an individual, she had touched upon the secret
sore of the nation and the time; and vast classes were already
brooding in silence over the absurd, vain, and empty regret at being
"neither Duke nor Marquis." The Revolution was at hand, and the days
rapidly approaching when all such pleasant assemblies as those held by
Mme. Lebrun would become forever impossible. At some of these, the
crowd of intimates, and of persons all acquainted with each other, was
so great, that the highest dignitaries of the realm had to content
themselves with sitting down upon the floor; and on one occasion, the
Marechal de Noailles, who was of exceedingly large build, had to
request the assistance of several of his neighbors before he could be
brought from his squatting attitude to his feet again.
Mme. Lebrun emigrated, like the majority of her associates,--going to
Russia, to Italy, to Germany, to England, and everywhere increasing
the number of her friends, besides preserving all those of former
times, whom she sedulously sought out in their voluntary exile, and to
whom, in many cases, she even proved an invaluable friend. In the
commencement of the Restoration, Mme. Lebrun returned to France, and
established herself definitively at Paris, and at Louveciennes near
Marly, where she had a delightful summer residence. Here, as in her
salons in the metropolis, she tried to bring back the tone of French
society to what it had been before the Revolution, and to show the
younger generations what had been the gayety, the grace, the
affability, the exquisite good-breeding of those who had preceded
them. The men and women of her own standing seconded her, but the
younger ones were not to be drawn into high-heartedness; and an
observer might have had before him the somewhat strange spectacle of
old age gay, gentle, unobservant of any stiff formality, and of youth
preoccupied and grave, and, instead of being refined in manners,
pedantic. "The younger frequenters of Mme. Lebrun's salon," says
Mme. Ancelot, "were strangers to the world into which they found
themselves raised; those who surrounded them were of an anterior
civilization; they could not grow to be identified with a past which
was unknown to them, or known only through recitals that disfigured
it.... Amidst the remnants of a society that had been historical,
there was, as it were, the breath of a spirit born of our days; new
ideas, new opinions, new hopes, nay, even new recollections, were
evident all around, and served to render social unity impossible; but,
above all, what failed in this one particular centre was youth,--there
were few or no young people." This was perfectly true; and
Mme. Lebrun's _salon_ is interesting only from the fact of its
being the last, perhaps, in which French people of our day can have
acquired a complete notion of what the Pre-Revolutionary _salons_
of France were.
The evening _reunions_ at the house of Gerard, the celebrated
painter, were among the most famous features of the society of the
Restoration. The gatherings at Mmes. de Duras's and de Montcalm's
splendid hotels were all but exclusively political and diplomatic;
whereas at Gerard's there was a mixture of these with the purely
mundane and artistic elements, and, above all, there was a portion of
Imperialist fame blended with all the rest, that was hard to be found
anywhere else. Gerard, too, had painted the portraits of so many
crowned heads, and been so much admitted into the intimacy of his
royal models, that, whenever a foreigner of any note visited Paris, he
almost immediately asked to be put in a way to be invited to the
celebrated artist's Wednesday receptions. This was, to a certain
degree, an innovation in regular French society; the French being most
truly, as has been said, the "Chinese of Europe," and liking nothing
less than the intermixture with themselves of anything foreign. But
Gerard was one of those essentially superior men who are able to
influence those around them, and bring them to much whereto no one
else could have persuaded them. Gerard, like many celebrated persons,
was infinitely superior to what he _did_. As far as what he
_did_ was concerned, Gerard, though a painter of great merit, was
far inferior to two or three of whom France has since been justly
proud; but in regard to what he _was_, Gerard was a man of
genius, who had in many ways few superiors. Few men, even in France,
have so highly deserved the reputation of _un homme d'esprit_. He
was as _spirituel_ as Talleyrand himself, and almost as
clear-sighted and profound. Add to this that nothing could surpass the
impression made by Gerard at first sight. He was strikingly like the
first Napoleon, but handsomer; with the same purity of outline, the
same dazzlingly lustrous eyes, full of penetration and thought, but
with a certain _sympathetic_ charm about his whole person that
the glorious conqueror of Marengo and Dictator of Gaul never
possessed.
Gerard was not entirely French; born in Rome in 1770, his father only
was a native of France, his mother was an Italian; and from her he
inherited a certain combination of qualities and peculiarities that at
once distinguished him from the majority of his countrymen. Full of
poetic fire and inspiration, there was in Gerard at the same time a
strong critical propensity, that showed itself in his caustic wit and,
sometimes, not unmalicious remarks. There was also a perpetual
struggle in his character between reflection and the first impulse,
and sometimes the _etourderie_ of the French nature was suddenly
checked by the caution of the Italian; but, take him as he was, he was
a man in a thousand, and those who were in the habit of constantly
frequenting his house affirm loudly and with the deepest regret, that
they shall never "look upon his like again."
Gerard had built for himself a house in the Rue des Augustins, near
the ancient church of St. Germain des Pres; and there, every Wednesday
evening, summer and winter, he received whatever was in any way
illustrious in France, or whatever the other capitals of Europe sent
to Paris, _en passant_. "Four small rooms," says Mme. Ancelot,
"and a very small antechamber, composed the whole apartment. At twelve
o'clock tea was served, with eternally the same cakes, over which a
pupil of Gerard's, Mlle. Godefroy, presided. Gerard himself talked;
his wife remained nailed to a whist-table, attending to nothing and to
nobody. Evening once closed in, cards were the only occupation of
Mme. Gerard."
From Mme. de Stael down to Mlle. Mars, from Talleyrand and Pozzo di
Borgo down to M. Thiers, there were no celebrities, male or female,
that, during thirty years, (from 1805 to 1835,) did not flock to
Gerard's house, and all, how different soever might be their character
or position, agreed in the same opinion of their host; and those who
survive say of him to this day,--"Nothing in his _salons_
announced that you were received by a great _Artist_, but before
half an hour had elapsed you felt you were the guest of a
distinguished Man; you had seen by a glance at Gerard's whole person
and air that he was something apart from others,--that the sacred fire
burned there!"
The regret felt for Gerard's loss by all who ever knew him is not to
be told, and speaks as highly for those who cherished as for him who
inspired it. His, again, was one of the _salons_ (impossible now
in France) where genius and social superiority, whether of birth or
position, met together on equal terms. Without having, perhaps, as
large a proportion of the old _noblesse de cour_ at his house as
had Mme. Lebrun, Gerard received full as many of those eminent
personages whose political occupations would have seemed to estrange
them from the world of mixed society and the Arts. This is a
_nuance_ to be observed. Under the Empire, hard and despotic as
was the rule of Bonaparte, and anxious even as he was to draw round
him all the aristocratic names that would consent to serve his
government, there was--owing to the mere force of events and the
elective origin of the throne--a strong and necessary democratic
feeling, that assigned importance to each man according to his
works. Besides this, let it be well observed, the first Empire had a
strong tendency to protect and exalt the Arts, from its own very
ardent desire to be made glorious in the eyes of posterity. Napoleon
I. was, in his way, a consummate artist, a prodigiously intelligent
_metteur en scene_ of his own exploits, and he valued full as
much the man who delineated or sang his deeds, as the minister who
helped him to legislate, or the diplomatist who drew up protocols and
treaties. The Emperor was a lover of noise and show, and his time was
a showy and a noisy one. Bonaparte had, in this respect, little enough
of the genuine Tyrant nature. Unlike his nephew, he loved neither
silence nor darkness; he loved the reflection of his form in the broad
noon of publicity, and the echo of his tread upon the sounding soil of
popular renown. Could he have been sure that all free men would have
united their voices in chanting his exploits, he would have made the
citizens of France the freest in the whole world. Compression with him
was either a mere preventive against or vengeance for detraction.
Now this publicity-loving nature was, we repeat, as much served by Art
and artists as by politicians; nay, perhaps more; and for this reason
artists stood high during the period of the Empire. Talma held a
social rank that under no other circumstances could have been his, and
a painter like Gerard could welcome to his house statesmen such as
Talleyrand or Daru, or marshals of France, and princes even. We shall
show, by-and-by, how this grew to be impossible later. At present we
will recur to Mme. Ancelot for a really very true description of two
persons who were among the _habitues_ of the closing years of
Gerard's weekly receptions, and one of whom was destined to universal
celebrity: we allude to Mme. Gay, and her daughter, Delphine,--later,
Mme. Girardin. Of these two, the mother, famous as Sophie Gay, was as
thorough a remnant of the exaggerations and bad taste of the Empire as
were the straight, stiff, mock-classical articles of furniture of the
Imperialist hotels, or the _or-moulu_ clocks so ridiculed by
Balzac, on which turbaned Mamelukes mourned their expiring steeds. All
the false-heroics of the literature of the Empire found their
representative (their last one, perhaps) in Mme. Sophie Gay, and it
has not been sufficiently remarked that she even transmitted a shade
of all this to her daughter, in other respects one of the most
sagacious spirits and one of the most essentially unconventional of
our own day. A certain something that was not in harmony with the tone
of contemporary writers here and there surprised you in Delphine de
Girardin's productions, and, as Jules Janin once said, "One would
think the variegated plumes of Murat's fantastic hat[2] were sweeping
through her brains!" This was her mother's doing. Delphine, who had
never lived during one hour of the glory of the Empire, had, through
the medium of her mother, acquired a slight tinge of its
_boursouflure_; and had it not been for her own personal good
taste, she would have been misled precisely by her strong lyrical
aptitudes. Madame Gay found in Gerard's _salon_ all the people
she had best known in her youth, and she was delighted to have her
early years recalled to her. Mme. Ancelot, who, like many of her
country women, felt a marked antipathy for Madame Gay, has given a
very true portrait of both mother and daughter.
"Many years after," she writes, "when these ladies were (through M. de
Girardin) at the head of one of the chief organs of the Paris press,
they were much flattered and courted; at the period I speak of" (about
1817-1825) "their position was far from brilliant, and Mme. Gay was
far from popular. Every word that fell from her mouth, uttered in a
sharp tone, and full of bitterness and envy, went to speak ill of
others and prodigiously well of herself. She had a mania for titles
and tuft-hunting, and could speak of no one under a marquis, a count,
or a baron. Her daughter's beauty and talents caused her afterwards to
be more generally admitted into society; but at this period she was
avoided by most people."
Her daughter's beauty was certainly marvellous, and when, under the
reign of Louis Philippe, American society had in Paris more than one
brilliant representative and more than one splendid centre of
hospitality, where all that was illustrious in the society of France
perpetually flocked, we make no doubt many of our countrymen noticed,
whether at theatre or concert or ball, the really queenlike air of
Mme. de Girardin, and the exquisitely classic profile, which,
enframed, as it were, by the capricious spirals of the lightest,
fairest flaxen hair, resembled the outline of some antique statue of a
Muse.
Delphine Gay and her mother were more the ornaments of the
_salon_ of the Duchesse d'Abrantes, perhaps, than of that of
Gerard; and as the former continued open long after the latter was
closed by death, not only the young girl, whose verses were so
immensely in fashion during the Restoration, was one of the constant
guests of Junot's widow, but she continued to be so as the wife of
Emile de Girardin, the intelligent and enterprising founder of the
newspaper "La Presse."
The _salon_ of the Duchesse d'Abrantes was one of the first of a
species which has since then found imitators by scores and hundreds
throughout France. It was the _salon_ of a person not in herself
sufficiently superior or even celebrated to attract the genuine
superiorities of the country without the accessory attractions of
luxury, and not sufficiently wealthy to draw around her by her
splendid style of receiving, and to disdain the bait held out to those
she invited by the presence of great "lions." Gerard gave to his
guests, at twelve o'clock at night, a cup of tea and "eternally the
same cakes" all the year round; but Gerard was the type of the great
honors rendered, as we have observed, to Art under the Empire, and to
his house men went as equals, whose daily occupations made them the
associates of kings. This was not the case with the Duchesse
d'Abrantes. She had notoriety, not fame. Her "Memoires" had been read
all through Europe, but it is to be questioned whether anything beyond
curiosity was satisfied by the book, and it certainly brought to its
author little or none of that which in France stands in lieu even of
fortune, but which is not easy to obtain, namely,--_consideration_.
The Duchesse d'Abrantes was rather popular than otherwise; she was
even beloved by a certain number of persons; but she never was what is
termed _consideree_,--and this gave to her _salon_ a different aspect
from that of the others we have spoken of. A dozen names could be
mentioned, whose wearers, without any means of "entertaining" their
friends, or giving them more than a glass of _eau sucree_, were yet
surrounded by everything highest and best in the land, simply because
they were _gens considerables_, as the phrase went; but
Mme. d'Abrantes, who more or less received all that mixed population
known by the name of _tout Paris_, never was, we repeat, _consideree_.
The way in which Mme. Ancelot introduces her "friend," the poor
Duchesse d'Abrantes, on the scene, is exceedingly amusing and natural;
and we have here at once the opportunity of applying the remark we
made in commencing these pages, upon Mme. Ancelot's truthfulness. She
is the _habituee_ of the house of Mme. d'Abrantes; she professes
herself attached to the Duchess; yet she does not scruple to tell
everything as it really is, nor, out of any of the usual little
weaknesses of friendship, does she omit any one single detail that
proves the strange and indeed somewhat "Bohemian" manner of life of
her patroness. We, the readers of her book, are obviously obliged to
her for her indiscretions; with those who object to them from other
motives we have nothing to do.
Here, then, is the fashion in which we are introduced to Mme. la
Duchesse d'Abrantes, widow of Marshal Junot, and a born descendant of
the Comneni, Emperors of Byzantium.
Mme. Ancelot is sitting quietly by her fireside, one evening in
October, (some short time after the establishment of the monarchy of
July,) waiting to hear the result of a representation at the Theatre
Francais, where a piece of her own is for the first time being
performed. All at once, she hears several carriages stop at her door,
a number of persons rush up the stairs, and she finds herself in the
arms of the Duchesse d'Abrantes, who was resolved, as she says, to be
the first to congratulate her on her success. The hour is a late one;
supper is served, and conversation is prolonged into the "small
hours." All at once Mme. d'Abrantes exclaims, with an explosion of
delight,--"Ah! what a charming time is the night! one is so
deliciously off for talking! so safe! so secure! safe from bores and
from duns!" (_on ne craint ni les ennuyeux ni les creanciers_.')
Madame Ancelot affirms that this speech made a tremendous effect, and
that her guests looked at each other in astonishment. If this really
was the case, we can only observe that it speaks well for the
Parisians of the epoch at which it occurred; for, assuredly, at the
present day, no announcement of the kind would astonish or scandalize
any one. People in "good society," nowadays, in France, have got into
a habit of living from hand to mouth, and of living by expedients,
simply because they have not the strength of mind to live _out_
of society, and because the life of "the world" forces them to
expenses utterly beyond what they have any means of providing
for. However, we are inclined to believe that some five-and-twenty
years ago this was in no degree a general case, and that Mme.
d'Abrantes might perfectly well have been the first _maitresse de
maison_ to whom it happened.
"Alas!" sighs Mme. Ancelot, commenting upon her excellent friend's
strange confidence,--"it was the secret of her whole life that she
thus revealed to us in a moment of _abandon_,--the secret of an
existence that tried still to reflect the splendors of the Imperial
epoch, and that was at the same time perplexed and tormented by all
the thousand small miseries of pecuniary embarrassment. There were the
two extremes of a life that to the end excited my surprise. Grandeur!
want!--between those two opposites oscillated every day of the last
years of the Duchesse d'Abrantes; the exterior and visible portion of
that life arranged itself well or ill, as it best could, in the
middle,--now apparently colored by splendor, and now degraded by
distress; but at bottom the existence was unvaryingly what I state."
Madame d'Abrantes, at the period of her greatest notoriety, occupied
the ground-floor of a hotel in the Rue Rochechouart, with a garden,
where dancing was often introduced upon the lawn. Some remnants of
the glories of Imperialism were collected there, but the principal
_habitues_ were men of letters, artists, and young men who danced
well! (_les jeunes beaux qui dansaient bien!_) That one phrase
characterizes at once the ex-_belle_ of the Empire, the
contemporary of the sentimental Hortense de Beauharnais, and of the
more than _legere_ Pauline Borghese.
To the "new society of July" Mme. d'Abrantes was an object of great
curiosity. "I dote on seeing that woman!" said Balzac, one evening,
to Mme. Ancelot. "Only fancy! she saw Napoleon Bonaparte as a mere
boy,--knew him well,--knew him as a young man, unknown,--saw him
occupied, like anybody else, with the ordinary occurrences of
every-day life; then she saw him grow, and grow, and rise, and throw
the shadow of his name over the world. She seems to me somewhat like a
canonized creature who should all at once come and recount to me the
glories of paradise."
Balzac, it must be premised, was bitten just at this period by the
Napoleon mania, and this transformed his inquisitive attachment for
Mme. d'Abrantes into a kind of passion. It was at this period that he
chose to set up in his habitation in the Rue Cassini a sort of altar,
on which he placed a small statue of the Emperor, with these words
engraved upon the pedestal:--
"Ce qu'il avait commence par l'epee,
Je l'acheverai par la plume!"
What particular part of the Imperial work this was that Balzac was to
"complete by the pen" was never rightly discovered,--but for a time he
had a sun-stroke for Napoleon, and his attachment for Mme. d'Abrantes
partook of this influence.
One anecdote told by Mme. Ancelot proves to what a degree the union of
"grandeur" and "want" she has alluded to went. "Mme. d'Abrantes," says
her biographer of the moment, "was always absorbed by the present
impression, whatever that might happen to be; she passed from joy to
despair like a child, and I never knew any house that was either so
melancholy or so gay." One evening, however, it would seem that the
Hotel d'Abrantes was gayer than usual. Laughter rang loud through the
rooms, the company was numerous, and the mistress of the house in
unparalleled high spirits. If the tide of conversation seemed to
slacken, quickly Madame la Duchesse had some inimitable story of the
_ridicules_ of the ladies of the Imperial court, and the whole
circle was soon convulsed at her stories, and at her way of telling
them. The tea-table was forgotten. Generally, tea at her house was
taken at eleven o'clock; but on this occasion, midnight was long past
before it was announced, and before her guests assembled round the
table. If our readers are curious to know why, here was the reason:
All that remained of the plate had that very morning been put in pawn,
and when tea should have been served it was found that tea-spoons were
wanting! Whilst these were being sent for to the house of a friend
who lent them, Madame la Duchesse took charge of her guests, and
drowned their impatience in their hilarity.
It must be allowed that this lady was worthy to be the mother of the
young man who, one day, pointing to a sheet of stamped paper, on which
a bill of exchange might be drawn, said: "You see that; it is worth
five sous now; but if I sign my name to it, it will be worth nothing!"
This was a speech made by Junot's eldest son, known in Paris as the
Duc d'Abrantes, and as the intimate friend of Victor Hugo, from whom
at one time he was almost inseparable.