works a conversation which took place between himself and the chiefs of the revolutionary party in '93, when he could only have been five years of age. He fancied that, under the Restoration, he had spent several years in Vendée, and earned distinction among the Chouans. He also took great pride in having escaped from a hundred imaginary persecutions, which led his successor at the Academy to say of him, "He thought that he was wandering in the mountains to escape from the pursuit of the gendarmerie, when in reality he was only hunting butterflies !" Nodier's salon was the first in which eccentricity superseded conversation. There were grave men— -Saint Simonians and Fourierists-among the number; but everything that was serious was laughed at ; nothing that was natural, simple, or sensible was permitted, every one aimed at effect; and this state of things, repeated at Pradier's, had become general before Nodier's death, which occurred in 1844, and put an end to the réunions at the Arsenal.

The library called that of Sainte-Geneviève used to be preserved in the old buildings, formerly the convent of the Génovéfins, near the Pantheon. Many a pleasant hour have we spent among its dusty tomes. After the library in the Garden of Plants, it was the most quiet and the least numerously attended in Paris. Here, not many years ago, the amiable M. de Lancy used to hold his salons. He was not, like his confrère at the Garden of Plants, an animal magnetiser; M. de Lancy was a man of the world, had served under the Consulate at St. Domingo, and had long enjoyed different posts under the ministry of Talleyrand, before he retired to the apartment which was reached by an old stone staircase, with a ponderous iron railing, and then a long stone passage, like a cloister, reminding one of a world gone by.

M. de Lancy lived to remove with his library into the new building that was erected for its reception, but he never felt so much at home as he had done in the gloomy walls of the old monastery; and the new salon, with its bright furniture, never appeared to him so comfortable as the antique apartment in which he had spent so many years. The same friends assembled there around him; among them the learned M. Ferdinand Denis, Dr. Saint-Germain, M. Avenel, General de la Rue, M. X. Marmier, Charles Lafont, M. Porchat, Alfred des Essarts, M. de la Ville, Nibelle, Eugène Loudon, and others, all men of talent and ability, who contributed their quota of familiar and ingenious conversation; but still the old librarian missed his customary chair, his Gothic corner, which reminded one of the abbés of old, and he pined away till death relieved him in 1856.

Sterne tells a story of a beggar who never failed to raise contributions from passers-by, by appealing to their vanity; if we are to believe Madame Ancelot, it was by the same means that Madame Récamier filled her salons. Her stereotyped address to all new comers was:

"The emotion I experience at the sight of so superior an individual does not permit me to express as I would wish it the admiration I entertain the sympathy I feel. But you guess it, you understand me. My emotion says enough."

But Madame Ancelot herself held salons, and we must be so ungallant as to accept this version of Madame Récamier's success with a little-a very little-reserve. Vanity was no doubt at the bottom of all "succès de salon," be it in the receiver or the visitor. Madame Récamier was mani

To see

festly a rival of Madame Ancelot's in the art of bringing remarkable men to her réunions. Madame Récamier cast her nets from the Abbaye aux Bois, but she did not disdain, in pursuit of her game, hiring "a small and ugly house" at Auteuil, next door to a minister. Madame Récamier was old, and her charms had withered; Madame Ancelot had the taste, the passion, the genius of literature and art, Madame Récamier had only the vanity! Madame Ancelot, herself belonging to the Legitimist party, could not forgive Madame Récamier another thing: Chateaubriand was not only the hero, he was the deity of Madame Récamier's salon. The word is almost as strong as cathedral, ogive! Nay, Madame Récamier monopolised the literary colossus of Legitimists; she insisted that he should not show himself anywhere else, not even at Madame Ancelot's. Such was the rivalry of the Parisian salons. Chateaubriand, people had perforce to go to Madame Récamier's. Madame Ancelot went there, she takes care to tell us, to see the champion of her party, not the faded beauty, now supplanted by the arts and coquetry of Madame Récamier. This lady held her réunions daily from four to six. The rooms were so darkened that Madame Ancelot says she has seen the philosopher Ballanche mistaken for the lady of the house. Madame Récamier's salons were also frequented by all the great critics of the day, Jules Janin, Théophile Gauthier, Edouard Thierry, Fiorentino, Francis Wey, Léon Gozlan, &c. Conversation was carried on sotto voce, quite the reverse to the fashion in vogue at Nodier's and Pradier's. The Legitimists deemed themselves personages of a superior order, and if any one spoke loud he was held to be unworthy of the company. Chateaubriand spoke seldom, but he sometimes listened when anything was said to interest him, if not, he would caress a cat from the gutters, "un chat de gouttière," that was for some unknown reason admitted into the salon. Chateaubriand was "vieilli, ennuyé, découragé, yet Beyle (Stendahl) said of him that he was the great Lama of Madame Récamier's salon. He was in the habit of going to bed every evening at nine o'clock, and he did so even the night when his tragedy of "Moïse" was produced at the Odéon. He took care, however, to send his old valet to report progress, and on his return, needless to say, the author had not gone to sleep.

"Well!" he inquired, affecting indifference at the same time, "how did it go off?"

66

Perfectly, Monsieur le Vicomte; the company never ceased to laugh from the beginning to the end, and I assure you I laughed heartily

too!"

At

Chateaubriand turned on his pillow and went to sleep as best he could. With Chateaubriand's death, Madame Récamier's salon became one more of the "foyers éteints," as Madame Ancelot calls them. Ballanche was also dead, and M. Ampère had gone on his travels in the East and in the New World. A gloomy sadness took possession of the Abbaye aux Bois. Chateaubriand's arm-chair had been made a kind of altar. length, the fatal epidemic of 1850 carried off one who had spent a whole life in entertaining " ce qu'il y a de plus gracieux au monde ;" and Madame Ancelot-a true woman-will not allow to this great rival leader in the sway of salons even a quiet death. Her last days, she asserts, were embittered by disappointment, and her last moments were pained by the sense of the perishability of human vanities!

The Vicomte d'Arlincourt, author of the "Solitaire," and some twenty other novels, used also to hold his salons. His father, a fermier-général, made over his fortune to Monsieur in distress. When Monsieur became Louis XVIII., the moneys were repaid, and one-half was made over by the viscount to his brother, the general. The "vieil enfant," as Madame Ancelot calls the novelist, somehow or other expended all his resources, when he was luckily once more reinstated by the generosity of an old lady. It was then that he set up his carriage and opened his salons in the Rue Neuve des Capucines. Chateaubriand never wore more than a little bit of red ribbon. D'Arlincourt used to receive his friends with three diamond stars, two great crosses, and seventeen smaller decorations on his breast. He was aristocratic ostentation personified. The arms on his carriage were upon a gigantic scale. His equipage and servants rivalled those of a sheriff of London. Madame Ancelot calls his salons "soirées de vanité." His devotion to the cause of Legitimacy led him to pay a visit to the exiles of Frosdorff. When about to quit them, he could not help sighing how dull they would be. When questioned as to his meaning, he said, "Why, have I not been reading my works to them every evening for a fortnight." He used to say that Paris was solely occupied with its two viscounts (Chateaubriand and himself)-the two great writers of the nineteenth century!

D'Arlincourt wrote a tragedy called "Le Siége de Paris." One of the characters had to say:

J'habite à la montagne, et j'aime à la vallée.

"A l'avaler!" exclaimed some one, loud enough to be heard all over the house. A little further on occurred the following line:

Mon vieux père, en ce lieu, seul à manger m'apporte.

"Seul a mangé ma porte!" repeated the same voice.

"What an appetite!" echoed others, "to swallow a mountain and eat a door!" And the whole house was confused with laughter. D'Arlincourt rubbed his hands and said, "It is like Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo." After all, it is conceded that D'Arlincourt was a good man, vain and frivolous to a degree, but he never said or did a thing to hurt or injure a fellow-creature. Yet was the decline of the old man's life embittered by a long prosecution for a sad attempt he made to pen some pages of contemporaneous history. He was a sheep among the wolves!

The Marquis de Custine, best known in this country for his "Revelations of Russian Society," is described as a "vrai gentilhomme." He belonged to the old nobility, was allied to the first French families, and was, moreover, one of the last representatives of that intellectual sharpness of which the Prince de Ligne had been the embodiment, Montesquieu the interpreter, and Voltaire the expression. M. de Custine satirised England quite as much as he did Russia; but while Russia resented the onslaught, England never noticed it.

"C'est qu'elle est trop fière," says Madame Ancelot," cette belle dame sûre de sa force, et qu'elle dit comme le Scythe devant Alexandre: 'Nous ne craignons que Dieu, et nous ne comptoms qu'avec lui. "

England was, however, revenged. M. de Custine wrote a tragedy, and paid-ay, paid over and over again, in the current coin of the

realm-to have it produced at the Porte Saint-Martin, where it was hissed off the stage. So thoroughly had the marquis been fleeced, that a celebrated actor said to the director, perceiving that he was going away,

"What! are you going to let him off? He has got his watch yet!" M. de Custine's salons would have been the best in Paris, but they failed in the one great essential to success-continuity. He was never quiet-always away in one direction or another-till it was said of him that he knew London, Petersburg, and Madrid better than Paris.

The salons of olden times, Madame Ancelot tells us, are now gone by. They are so many foyers éteints-hearths that are dead, homes that are dispersed, domestic fires for ever extinguished! There are still soirées, where people are seated and crowded so that they cannot speak to one another; there are parties, where people are supposed to dance; and there are réunions, in which stockbrokers and bankers take the place of the gentlemen of former times, and of a nobility with historic names; but there is no longer the bond of union that existed of old-a complete equality. The only real equality that ever existed is that of intelligence, of education, of manners: never can a coarse and ignorant man be the equal of a well-informed, well-educated man. Nothing, concludes Madame Ancelot, can be more absurd than to introduce equality into the law without making education general. Admit this, would every person be alike intelligent, refined, high principled? There may and ought to be equality before the law; there never can be equality between all natures; nor is it likely that our amiable authoress's dream will ever be accomplished, or that France shall only be one vast "salon," filled with coequals in intelligence and education, holding out to one another the hand of friendship!

THANATOS ATHANATOS.

A MEDLEY.

XIII.

THE CONCOMITANTS OF DEATH:-ILLUSTRATIONS FROM MILTON, GRAY, "TRISTRAM SHANDY," JEREMY TAYLOR, MONTAIGNE, YOUNG, GOLDSMITH, ISAAC DISRAELI, &c.-SICK-ROOMS AND CEMETERIES: THE "PRETTY PAGANISM" OF LEIGH HUNT, DOUGLAS JERROLD, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND G. W. CURTIS.

And death is not so terrible in itself as the concomitants of it, a loathsome disease, pain, horror, &c.-BURTON's Anatomy of Melancholy, II. 3, § 5.

And after all came Life; and lastly Death:
Death with most grim and griesly visage seene,
Yet is he nought but parting of the breath;
Ne ought to see, but like a shade to weene,
Unbodied, unsoul'd, unheard, unseene.

SPENSER: Faerie Queene, Canto VII.

THE above portraiture of Death, by gentle Edmund Spenser, as neither more nor less than, so to speak, a mere negation, is of a kind greatly affected by many who seek to divest the king of terrors of his

terrors, the last enemy of his enmity and power to hurt. Not Death, they say, but the forerunners, associations, and accompaniments of Death, are really the occasion of apprehension and alarm. Not the mysterious Visitor himself, but his suite, his train of poursuivants, or rather the heralds he sends to prepare his way before him.

What says Michael the Archangel, in answer to Adam's piteous exclamation, after his dreadful pre-vision of Cain killing his brother Abel, "But have I now seen Death? Is this the way I must return to native dust? O sight of terror, foul and ugly to behold, horrid to think, how horrible to feel!"

To whom thus Michael: "Death thou hast seen
In his first shape on man; but many shapes
Of death, and many are the ways that lead
To his grim cave, all dismal: yet to sense
More terrible at the outset, than within."

It is but the same thing we read in that familiar stanza of Gray's :

Lo! in the vale of years beneath

A grisly troop are seen,

The painful family of Death,

More hideous than their Queen.

Gray's private correspondence so far carries out this view, that we find him writing to Mason, when the latter had just lost his father: "It is something that you had a little time to acquaint yourself with the idea beforehand; and that your father suffered but little pain, the only thing that makes death terrible."

(Lest it should not already have been said often enough, let us here say once again, that our design in this MEDLEY excludes the theological or religious aspect-so far at least as the religious element, in its more latent and indirect influences, can be excluded. Hence we quote only, not comment on, or question, Gray's mention of physical pain, as the only thing that makes death terrible. We see his drift, and the reader is by this time aware of ours.)

One of the most note-worthy portrayals of death as a mere negation, in the view thus taken of it, is perhaps to be found in one of Mr. Shandy's monologues for the behoof of his dear brother Toby. "There

is no terror, brother Toby, in its looks, but what it borrows from groans and convulsions—and the blowing of noses and the wiping away of tears with the bottoms of curtains in a dying man's room. Strip it of these,— What is it?

(""Tis better in battle than in bed, said my uncle Toby.)

"Take away its hearses, its mutes, and its mournings, its plumes, escutcheons, and other mechanic aids-What is it?-Better in battle! (continued my father) . . . it is terrible no way-for consider, brother Toby, when we are, death is not;-and when death is, we are not.” Whereupon, Uncle Toby lays down his pipe, to consider.

But let us have a safer authority in philosophic divinity than Tristram's too crotchety sire. The passage to be quoted bears internal evidence throughout of the "golden mouth" that uttered it, our English Chrysostom, Bishop Jeremy Taylor: "Take away but the pomps of death, the disguises and solemn bugbears, the tinsel, and the actings by candlelight, and proper and fantastic ceremonies, the minstrels and the noise