foie gras, pâté de Perigord, and white hermitage with the lady of his thoughts. The petticoats of the opera dancers were lengthened by command of the menus plaisirs; and Seminaries arose, both in Paris and the suburbs, which caused as loud an uproar against the Jesuits as now against the fortifications; though the time never came for either Jesuits or Artillery to take up their position.

But the consequences of the restraint which the society of the petit Château imposed upon itself to conciliate the King, were bien autre chose! Most people have read those curious memoirs of Dangeau, written as if expressly to exemplify the littleness of the illustrious.Now the reign of Charles X., with its stern Dauphiness and skittish Madame resembled comme deux gouttes d'eau, the declining years of Louis XIV. with its solemn Madame de Maintenon and brilliant Duchesse de Bourgogne:the same intolerance, the same levity! Madame de Stael (not the Baroness) when she describes

herself in her convent putting ink into the font of holy water, so that, when the nuns crossed themselves on the forehead at midnight, they might arrive in the chapel hideous as so many demons, never played wilder pranks than the belle Princesse of the Pavillon de Marsan;-and the King's Majesty, absorbed by prayers and parties de chasse, had little leisure to read lectures for her emendation.

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From all this, arose an order of society

pleasant but wrong:"-very pleasant, I am certain, very wrong I am afraid;-fifty times worse at all events than when, peccadillos being courtly virtues, they were kept within moderate dimensions to be entitled to appear openly en manteau de cour.

The morality of either court or city, however, was no affair of mine. I was not the royal confessor, or Archbishop of Paris. All I saw in the coterie du petit chateau was a group of pretty, witty, gracious, graceful women, whose Cavaliers exhibited a happy

admixture of the manly habits of Englishmen and the polished manners of Frenchmen; addicted to hunting and shooting, whist and the Italian opera,-steeple chases and bals de l'opéra; and after a brilliant soirée or two spent in their society, I no longer wondered at the multitudes of my fair countrywomen and dark countrymen, who annually mark their preference for the sparkling coteries of Paris, over the heavy machinery of the social system of Great Britain.

French politics, on the other hand, are matters of too effervescent nature for a man of my indolent habits to uncork. If the wisdom of our English parliament be inscrutable to the blindness of puppy eyes; Heaven knows the turbulence of the French Chamber is fifty-fold more puzzling.

Like Charles X., therefore, who, the more uproarious the liberal party and the more critical the session, only redoubled the number of his battues, making war upon the boar

and roebuck, while his ministry made war upon the press, I prefer dwelling upon the pastimes of Paris to its political struggles.

Let me not be thought so ungracious as to have omitted to inquire, on my arrival, after the health of the misunderstood angel in the Rue du Montblanc, whom I was supposed to have comprehended. A day or two after reaching Paris, I proceeded to leave cards for Monsieur le Comte and Madame la Comtesse Anacharsis de la Vrillière; when, by the peculiar smile of the concierge, I saw that I was committing some species of blunder; and it is no joke to blunder in a city, where it is proverbially said of blunders-C'est pire qu'un vice, pire qu'un crime,—c'est un ridicule!

"Il parait que je me trompe, mon cher?" said I, addressing the man with the familiarity which does not authorize a Parisian menial to be familiar in return.

"Monsieur est étranger!" he replied, shrugging his shoulders, as if the word foreigner

were an excuse and apology for any amount of stupidity. "If Monsieur were not étranger,

he could scarcely be ignorant that Monsieur le Comte de la Vrillière, who once resided in this Hotel, is now called Monsieur le Comte de St. Gratien, from the fine estate he chased in Normandy twelve years ago."

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"The Comte de St. Gratien ?-Not the present Ministre de l'instruction publique?" cried I, recalling to mind how little the line of policy or politics I had heard attributed to that essentially Bourbonian statesman, were in accordance with the tenets of an old Napoleonic Conseiller d'état.

"Even so, Monsieur!" replied the concierge, -holding his head a little higher at the association of so dignified a public functionary with his porter's lodge, even retrospectively.—" If Monsieur designs the honour of a visit to Monsieur le Comte or Madame la Comtesse, he will find them at their official residence in the Rue de Grenelle St. Germain."