Madame Mohl, Her Salon and Her Friends: Second Paper

THERE were two drawing-rooms at Mrs. Clarke’s : one for conversation; the other for music, dancing, blind-man’sbuff, or whatever the company liked. The music sometimes carried the day so completely that it silenced the conversation in the other room, and drew all to listen. Among the amateur artists who achieved this triumph were Madame Andryames, Silvio Pellico’s companion in captivity, who many a time held old and young spellbound by her voice. The Princesse de la Moskowa, the Marquise de Gabriac, Madame de Sparre, and others made the evenings brilliant with their gift of song, cultivated as so many women of rank cultivated it then.

Another dilettante of talent was M. de Maupas, then quite a young man, making his début in society, and as yet “ uncorruptod ; ” nothing tending to denote him as the future minister of Napoleon III.

Among the literary stars of the circle, the most prominent at this period was Fauriel. He was, par excellence, the ami de la maison, and therefore deserves a special mention in this record of Mary Clarke and her salon. Fauriel was born in 1772, and was consequently eighteen years older than Mary. He was already distinguished as a writer when he made her acquaintance. Jouffroy, the great critic, said of Fauriel’s Chants Populaires de la Grèce Moderne, “It is a book that men of letters and historians will quarrel for, because it presents to the former a poetic monument of the greatest originality, and to the latter authentic documents on an unknown people whom Europe has just conquered in the middle of the Mediterranean.” Fauriel was a man of rare goodness and refinement, and so extremely conscientious that whenever a question arose which put, or threatened to put, his principles at variance in the smallest degree with the duties of his situation his first impulse was to escape the difficulty by sending in his resignation. He had done this so often that it became a joke among his friends. One day, Fauriel was relating how he and some of his intimates had been distributing to one another imaginary political rôles; he was going to say what rôle had fallen to him, when Guizot interrupted him with “ You need not tell us, my dear fellow; we know what it was.” “ And what was it?” asked Fauriel, in surprise. “ Why, of course, you gave in your resignation.”

In 1834, Fauriel published in the Revue des Deux Mondes a study on Dante and the origin of Italian literature, which brought him prominently forward as a student of deep research and erudition, and led to his being named to the chair of foreign literature at the Sorbonne. It also brought him into personal contact with the leading Italian writers of the day. Manzoni he already knew, but from this date they grew very intimate. The Clarkes soon afterward made a journey to Italy, and were accompanied by Fauriel, who introduced them to all his friends. They spent some time at Milan, where they saw a great deal of Manzoni. They owed the Italian element of their salon to this winter spent in the Italian cities.

Fauriel had a sincere attachment to Mary Clarke, which she reciprocated, and it was a matter of surprise to many that this mutual attraction did not end in marriage. It was strong enough on her side, at any rate, to prevent her marrying any one else while Fauriel lived.¹

Thiers had been intimate with the Clarkes from the prehistoric times of the Rue Bonaparte. When he came to Paris in 1821, a young man of five and twenty, he was introduced to Mrs. Clarke, with a view to enlisting her influence in getting him employment. She made him known to Manuel, the editor of the Constitutiounel, who at once discerned the value of the young aspirant to journalistic service, and put him on the staff of his newspaper. The Clarkes’ society was, no doubt, a great resource to the lonely young provincial, and it seemed a matter of course that he should fall in love with Mary. He used to come every evening, and talk with her for hours ; staying so late that the concierge lost patience, and said to her one morning, “Mademoiselle, if that little student does not take himself off before midnight, I will lock the gate, and he may sleep on the staircase ! ” After this, the little student was dismissed earlier. Though less assiduous in his attendance than in these young days, Thiers remained one of the habitués of the Rue du Bac.

Mérimée used to go there frequently to practice his English, at which he was working hard. Mrs. Clarke helped him by correcting his mistakes, and Mary by laughing at them.

M. de Tocqueville was another of their habitués, as well as Guizot, Cousin, Augustin Thierry, Benjamin Constant, Mignet, Boretty, etc.; in tact, the cleverest men of the day. But among all these brilliant personalities Julius Mohl calls for chief notice, not merely because of his merit and distinction, but because of the part he was to play in Mary’s life.

His father, Herr von Mold, was minister to the King of Würtemberg. He was of noble birth and very small fortune. He had four sons, who had all to make their way in the world. His wife was a cultivated, clever woman, an admirable manager as well as a devoted mother. By dint of strict economy and self-denial, she saved out of their small means enough to give her sons a firstrate education, thus providing them with means of honorable livelihood. Her noble ambition was that no son of hers should ever be compelled to sell his opinions (vendre sa pensée). She secured to them this intellectual independence at cost of much patient courage and self-sacrifice, and they all repaid her abundantly, attaining distinction in their separate careers, and loving their mother with the most chivalrous affection.

Julius Mohl, from his earliest boyhood, showed rare taste for Oriental languages and lore; and so great was his proficiency in this line that, at the age of twenty, he was offered a professorship at the University of Tübingen, in Würtemberg. He refused it, on the plea that he could not become a teacher while still a learner. “ I must,” he said,

“ feel myself master of Oriental languages before I attempt to profess them.”

Soon after this he got the promise of a scholarship at the College of Benares, and went to London to make the final arrangements for his journey to India. From some unexplained cause the whole scheme fell through, and instead of going to Benares Julius crossed over to Paris. This was about 1822. In Paris he set to work at his chosen studies, following M. de Sacy’s Cours of Persian and Arabic, Abel Rémusat’s Cours of Chinese, and that of M. Burnouf, then secretary to the Société Asiatique.

Not long after coming to Paris he met Dr. Roulain, an able and learned man, with whom he formed a close friendship, which they tested by living together for many years in perfect harmony.

His meeting with Jean Jacques Ampère was another important event in his early Paris life. Ampère had just returned from one of his long journeys, and was the hero of the day. Everybody wanted to see him, to hear him talk, — he was the most delightful of talkers. Julius Mohl met him for the first time at the house of Cuvier. He was extraordinarily brilliant that evening, and quite inebriated the company. They drew him out about his travels, made him tell stories, and received all he said with the warmest applause. Julius Mohl knew not what to think of it: It upset all his conventional ideas of what a learned and literary man ought to be; but when Ampère, yielding to the entreaties of the company, took his stand at the chimney-corner, and began to declaim verses of his own composition, exciting the feeling of the audience to enthusiasm, the amazement of the quiet, reverential German student reached its climax. “ Je n’en revenais pas” he wrote to a friend, long after.

“ I had never seen anything of the kind ; and though, since then, I have been present at many affairs of the sort, I have never grown used to them.” To M. Mohl it was a totally new phase of literary character and deportment, as well as of social life.

From this first meeting, however, dated a close and warm friendship between him and Ampère. He took a room next to Ampère’s, and they lived almost in common for many years. The partnership was broken by Ampere’s periodical absences on long journeys ; but when he was in Paris the two friends were “ done for ” by the concierge and his wife M. and Madame Félix. An entire dissemblance of character between these two friends of Mary Clarke’s did not prove any impediment to perfect mutual understanding. Ampère was remarkable for his absence of mind, and a sort of mental untidiness which reproduced itself in the disorder of his external and pecuniary affairs. Mohl, though unconscious as a babe of externals, was the most orderly of men in his mind ; he cared nothing for money, but he knew to a fraction how much he had and how far it must go. Ampère’s incapacity for taking care of himself kept his friends perpetually on the qui vive. Coming home from the Abbaye, one winter’s night, shivering with cold, he stirred up the embers, and sat down to warm himself, piling up logs of wood till the chimney took fire, and blazed away so fiercely that it threatened the safety of the house. At this point Ampère noticed that something was amiss. He rushed in to Mold, who was howling with toothache under the blankets, dragged him out of bed, and adjured him to put out the fire.

Mohl’s unconsciousness was of the most harmless kind. He would, for instance, wear out the carpet of his room till the holes tripped one up by the. heel, and made treading upon it unsafe; and when Madame Félix called his attention to the fact he would go out and buy a new one, and politely beg the tradesman who brought it home to spread it out over the old, it never occurring to him that it was necessary to remove the latter.

Ampère, starting on his never-ending expeditions, — “dancing over the world like a will-o’-the-wisp,” as Mary Clarke said, — would stow away his money in his stockings ; then he would forget this, and drop it about when pulling on the stockings; or he would lose the pair that held the chief deposit; or he would leave behind his portmanteau, and find himself stranded in some out-of-the-way place, and write home to Mohl to go and receive and transmit to him other moneys which were due to him. Mohl, though oblivious to an incredible degree of his own wants, was the most punctual and orderly of men in managing the affairs of his friends, and would execute these commissions with the utmost promptitude, attending to every detail with careful accuracy.

When the two friends were together they found a great bond in common pursuits. They both followed the Chinese class of M. Rémusat, and studied many other subjects together, making joint stock of their wealth of brains. In recalling those days, Mohl would say, “Ah, those were the good old times ! ” Under a rough exterior and blunt manner Julius Mold hid the kindest heart, — a combination that got him the sobriquet of le bourru bienfaisant. He was a centre of help, both moral and material, to his struggling fellow countrymen ; assisting them not only with good counsel, but, poor as he was, by giving or obtaining for them pecuniary aid in many a critical strait. For he was very poor. These “ good old times,” that in later years he could look back upon through the beautifying haze of memory, were times of austere privation and self-denial. He had brought his little patrimony with him, and kept it, not, perhaps, in his stockings, but in some bank equally accessible and unremunerative. He had nothing but this patrimony to live on, and he must go on spending it until he had completed his studies, and was free to devote to earning money some of the time now wholly absorbed by them. When an old and comparatively rich man, he used to relate to M. Antoine d’Abbadie ² how he had learned to spend exactly five sous a day on his breakfast. He invested in a sack of potatoes, which he kept in a closet off his room; every morning Madame Félix boiled him a dishful of these, which he ate en salade with a sausage and a hunch of bread. This was the only meal he took at home. He was in constant request among his friends, and he had a dress-coat which enabled him to accept their invitations to dinner every day. One day it occurred to him, What should he do if any accident should happen to his coat ? “ Many a time,” he said, relating these reminiscences to Madame d’Abbadie,³ — “many a time, when putting on that coat, I have shuddered at the mere thought of what must become of me if any mishap befell it. For years, that coat was an income to me.”

But neither the coat nor his rigid economy could prevent his capital from melting away. It had dwindled to the sum of two thousand seven hundred francs (£108), when one morning a friend came to him in a state of despair, and asked him for the sum of twelve hundred francs. “ If I don’t get it at once, I am a ruined man,” he said, " and there is nothing left for me but suicide.” Julius Mold was generous as the sunlight, and cared as little for money as any man in need of it could do ; but this was asking him for a proof of generosity and disinterestedness little short of the heroic. He explained his position, and begged his friend to consider, before exacting the sacrilice, whether he did not know some one else who was better able to make it. No, the friend said, he knew no one. Julius gave the money ; but when he reckoned up what remained to him his heart sank, and he asked himself in dismay what was to become of him when the diminished hoard was exhausted. Fortunately help was at hand. A friend ⁴ learned that he was in great straits, and went to M. Villemain, who was then member of the Conseil Royal de l’Universite, and, describing Julius Mold’s character, his noble passion for learning, and his honorable poverty, claimed for him one of the pensions granted to students without fortune. Villemain was interested, and at once obtained for him a pension of three thousand francs. Julius had not been many months in possession of this affluence when he was named Professor of Persian at the Collége de France, with a salary of five thousand francs. The appointment was a distinction which was rarely conferred on a foreigner, and his friends, Mary Clarke especially, were greatly elated by it. “ Can you not,” she writes to Ampère, “ have inserted in two or three newspapers the bare fact that M. Mold will make the twentyseventh naturalized foreigner who has been named professor at the College de France ? It was Rossi ⁵ who discovered that he would be the twenty-sixth, when they talked of appointing him before, and the statement is exact. I entreat you, do this, and say nothing about it to M. Mold, for be has not common sense on the point.”

He gave, indeed, on receiving this appointment, a singular proof of what many persons would probably consider a want of common sense. He went straight to M. Villemain, and after informing him of his nomination handed him back his pension. M. Villemain took up the paper, looked at Mold, and said, " I do not understand.”

“ I have been appointed professor, with a salary of five thousand francs,” explained Mold.

“ I know that, and I congratulate you ; but what has that to do with this pension ? ”

“ I have no longer any right to the pension ; it belongs to some student as poor as I was when it was granted to me.”

M. Villemain at last understood, and he expressed his admiration of Mohl’s disinterestedness with a warmth which, in its turn, astonished the young student as much as he had amazed his patron.

Julius Mohl related this incident some forty years afterwards to M. d’Abbadie, to prove the corruption that must have existed among men of letters, which alone could explain Villemain’s astonishment on meeting with an act of common honesty in one of them.

M. Villemain, from this date, conceived the most profound respect for Julius Mohl, and took a creditable pride in proclaiming it on all occasions. When he became minister he showed this regard by consulting him on all matters connected with Oriental lore, which was Julius Mohl’s special line. If there was an appointment in his gift, any mission to the East, etc., and Mohl applied for it for any friend of his, “ the thing was done ” at once. Villemaiu would sign “ with his eyes shut ” any recommendation from Mohl. He considered his science and erudition inexhaustible. The explorations at Nineveh and Babylon were undertaken at Mold’s suggestion during Villemain’s term of office, and carried out, as M. Botta repeatedly affirmed, on Mold’s indications.

In 1844, M. Mohl succeeded to M. Burnouf as secretary to the Société Asiatique, and was elected member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. He lived with Ampère till 1847 ; till his own marriage, in fact. Julius Mohl was endowed with that kind of charm which makes a man loved by those who come in contact with him. He had “a charm like a woman,” people used to say of him. His goodness, his unselfishness, his truthfulness, his powerful intellect, his fine humor, Ins sparkling conversation, his innate gentleness under an almost rustic simplicity, made of him the most delightful of companions and the most valuable of friends. Sainte-Beuve describes him as “a man who was the very embodiment of learning and of inquiry; the Oriental savant, — more than a savant, a sage,— with a mind clear, loyal, and vast; a German mind passed through an English filter, — a cloudless, unruffled mirror, open and limpid ; of pure and frank morality; early disenchanted with all things ; with a grain of irony devoid of all bitterness, the laugh of a child under a bald head, a Goethe-like intelligence, but free from all prejudice.”

A charming and spirituelle Frenchwoman said of Julius Mohl that Nature, in forming his character, had skimmed the cream of the three nationalities to which he belonged by birth, by adoption, and by marriage ; making him “ deep as a German, spirituel as a Frenchman, and loyal as an Englishman.”

The woman who was tenderly loved and patiently waited for by such a man for three terms of seven years could he no ordinary woman. Nor was she. Mary Clarke, if she lacked his high intellectual qualities, was in her way as original as Julius Mohl. Châteaubriand said of her, “ La Jeuue Anglaise is like no one else in the world.”

Fauriel, Mold’s friend for twenty years, died in 1844. Mohl attended him in his illness, and received his last breath. Mary Clarke grieved passionately over the loss of this devoted friend, whom she had loved with a tenderness that was, perhaps, a unique thing in her life, He had left her his library and certain literary papers, with the subsequent publication of which she took great pains. Two years after Fauriel’s death her mother died, and Mary felt herself absolutely alone in the world. Mrs. Frewen Turner’s life had drifted so far away from her French sister’s that the latter was practically as much alone as if she had no kith or kin ; and the sea lay between them.

About a year after her mother’s death she consented to marry Julius Mohl. She was fifty-seven years of age, and he forty-seven. They naturally shrank from any display on the occasion ; indeed, they took as many precautions to keep the matter secret as if they had been a pair of young lovers plotting an elopement. On the eve of the great event Mohl sent a note to his friend Professor Mérimée, which ran thus : —

“MON CHERMÉRIMÉE,—J’ai un service à vous demander: faites-moi le plaisir de venir demain matin à dix heures me servir de térnoin.” ⁶

Témoin in French means second in a duel, as well as witness to a marriage, and Mérimée, never dreaming that so confirmed a Benedict as his friend could contemplate getting married, jumped at the still more improbable conclusion that he was going to fight a duel. At the hour named, the next morning, he walked into Mohl’s room, exclaiming, “ In Heaven’s name, my dear Mohl, whom are you going to fight with ? Mohl reassured him, and received such congratulations as Mérimée was capable of giving under the circumstances.

Mary, on her side, had taken precautions not to be found out. She told her two maids that on a certain day she should go on a tour in Switzerland with a friend, and that she should be absent about a month. On the morning of the marriage, she dressed herself carefully in her best clothes, and drove to the church in a cab. The ceremony was performed in the presence of the témoins, and the newly married couple parted at the church door, and returned to their respective homes. Two days later they met again at a restaurant near the railway station, dined there with their witnesses, and set off on a wedding tour to Switzerland.

The event passed off without exciting the amount of gossip it might have done, owing partly to a great crime which was committed just then, and which absorbed public attention and drew private curiosity in another direction. Madame Mohl used to say, when relating the story of her marriage, “ Luckily for me, the Due de Preslin killed his wife, and this gave everybody so much to talk about that they forgot me and M. Mohl.”

Julius Mohl had dropped the aristocratic von before his name on becoming a naturalized Frenchman,⁷ and his wife always called him “ Mr.,” as if he had been an Englishman. Her marriage did not change the external framework of Madame Mold’s life. She continued to reside in her old apartment, which was quite large enough, her mother’s room being fitted up as a library for M. Mold.

Not long after their marriage, Châteaubriand died. He had long occupied the lower story of the house where the Clarkes lived. This had giveu Mary an opportunity of continuing the intimacy begun at the Abbaye, and a day seldom passed without her spending an hour, or more, with the poet. Her sprightly presence retained to the last the power of amusing him, and smoothing from his wrinkled brow the frown of ennui long permanently settled there. There were few now who thought it worth while to come and amuse the great poet, who had been so plentifully fed on flattery. But Madame Récamier was faithful and devoted as ever. Châteaubriand’s health had been failing for a long time, and when it was evident that the end was drawing near Madame Mohl asked Madame Récamier to come and stay with her, so that she might be within reach of her old friend at all hours. She came, and remained there three days. She used to sit for hours in his room, her blind but still beautiful eyes turned towards the dying man with a yearning gaze that was indescribably touching. The tone of his voice was her only guide to his state ; by it she knew whether he was suffering or not. Never before bad she felt the loss of sight so bitterly. “ Tell me how he looks,” she would say to Madame Mohl. “ Does he look often at me ? Does he seem glad when I come in ? Does he seem in pain ? ” She was present at the end, and knelt beside him while he breathed his last.

Madame Récamier survived her friend only a year. During the interval between his death and hers the Abbaye was like some deserted place, sacred to memories of the past. The very furniture of the drawing-room had a sort of inmemoriam air about it. In that armchair by the mantelpiece Châteaubriand had sat and pontificated ; no one ever sat in it now. That other, to the left, had been kindly old Ballanche’s accustomed seat. They were all gone ; and she, who had been their liege lady, their friend, sat looking at the empty places, and waiting for her turn. The message came to her in terrible guise. She had a morbid fear of cholera. When the epidemic broke out, her niece, Madame Lenormant, persuaded her to come and stay with her in the Rue Richelieu. She left the Abbaye with a certain reluctance, and scarcely had she done so when the spectre that she had fled from pursued and seized upon her. She died on the 11th of May, 1849.

If this event had occurred some years sooner, it would have made a sensation in the world; but politics and the recent revolution were absorbing everybody just then, and with the exception of a little circle of faithful friends no one noticed the setting of that sweet star that had shone so long and with such peerless lustre in the social heavens.

The revolution of ’48 dated a new era for Madame Mold’s salon. From 1830 it had been a remarkable centre. The revolution of July had been fatal to salon life, as all revolutions are, and the political atmosphere had continued stormy long after the change of kings had taken place, and the new monarch was firmly established on his throne. Social life had suffered deeply from this disturbance. Young couples would quarrel in the middle of a quadrille, and a fair enthusiast for the exiled prince would break away angrily in the waltz from a partner who declared himself for the new régime. The few salons that remained, such as Madame de Boigne’s and the Princess Lieven’s, became simply political coteries, or clubs where the members “ made opposition ” on one side or the other.

Legitimists retreated to their fortress in the Faubourg St. Germain, and railed from behind its gates at the " traitors ” who had gone over to the bourgeois king. The traitors were attacked with pens dipped in vitriol by the daily press; old wounds were envenomed, new ones inflicted ; the Chamber and the journals coalesced to abuse the government and its supporters, and it was bien porté in society to make chorus with this abuse.

This period of social dislocation was, nevertheless, a time of intense social vitality. The national life still drew its productive elements from those ranks that constitute society, and this draught maintained in society itself that vigor which it has lost siuce the system of reciprocal supply and demand has ceased. The great want of the moment was a legitimate ground on which all this latent activity could exercise itself. The question was, where to find a field of enterprise for those who were hindered ou all sides by barriers of political antagonisms. There was only one open, — one where all might meet on neutral ground: this was finance. For want of nobler opportunities, society took to making money.

Money has been a power from the beginning of the world, and will be to the end. It was a power in the days of the patriarchs and in the times of the crusaders: but in those primitive and mediæval ages, and even long after them, it was not supreme; it was controlled and kept down by higher forces, as the vulgar parvenu was kept in his place by the gentleman. There were bulwarks that protected society against the encroachments of Pluto. Noble birth, for instance, was of more account than money-bags, — it held them under its feet; so did genius, so did military glory. These things had, virtually at least, survived the wreck of ’93. But with the new reign came a change. The old chivalrous legend “ Noblesse oblige ” was furled in the White Flag, and disappeared with it. The golden calf was set up on high, and many bowed down to it who had never done so before. France grew rapidly rich. The immense resources of the country took a sudden and extraordinary development ; railways, finance, and commercial enterprise were stimulated under Louis-Philippe as they had never been under any preceding reign. This influx of wealth was undoubtedly a national and social gain, but it was also, in another sense, a social loss. If the shattered forces of society had rallied to the rescue, they might have made head against the invasion of plutocracy ; but they were divided against themselves. The old noblesse sulked in dignified retirement, and those of the upper classes who had gone over to the constitutional monarch went with the stream, and the stream had set towards the practical. Gentlemen whose grandfathers would have scorned to handle money, except to give it away, now went into finance, and were glad to let their sons go shares with an agent de change. It was the beginning of a new revolution, a golden sequel to the bloody one of a quarter of a century before, which was, in our own day, to reach its climax in the Bontoux adventure.⁸

This phase of discontent and irascible party feeling offered a grand opportunity to any one who wished to open a salon and provide a pleasant meeting-place, where people might breathe free from the pressure of politics. Mary Clarke turned the opportunity to account. She cared very little about politics or parties, though a staunch partisan of certain political representatives. Dr. Guineau de Mussy, who knew her well, says that she had an intense admiration and sympathy for the Duchess of Orleans, and a downright culte for the Comte de Paris, — a culte that she would explain on the ground of the fine qualities that she recognized in him.

She was always a sincere admirer of Louis-Philippe, and maintained, both during his reign and ever after, that his government was the one best suited to the nation, and that the French had been fools to turn him out. To the last day of her life she was faithful to this conviction, and yet her friends remember how fiercely she rated Louis-Philippe and his government, when there occurred that theft of books that has since become so famous. A man named Libri, who was librarian under the government, purloined a considerable number of costly books and manuscripts, old missals, and unique volumes of every sort, from the public libraries of Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, etc., and carried on this systematic robbery for years. When, finally, he was found out, Madame Mold’s indignation against the government, that had allowed the larceny to go on so long undiscovered, was beyond description. She abused the king and his ministers and the whole administration with a vehemence that drove an old friend to exclaim impatiently, “ And so, forsooth, because a man in the public service was a thief, you would upset the king and the cabinet ! ”

This headlong violence against the whole régime on account of an individual defalcation was extremely characteristic of Madame Mohl’s general manner of judging men and things. She was so entirely under the influence of her feelings at the moment that she lost sight, for the time being, of everything else, and went far beyond the bounds of reasonableness, and said a great deal more than she meant. People who happened to come in contact with her during this crisis of rage about the Libri robbery, and left Paris before it cooled down, carried away the impression that she hated Louis-Philippe as she afterwards hated Napoleon III. It was merely a passing ebullition. When it was over, she returned as firmly as ever to her allegiance to the liberal king. He was her first love in politics, and her last.

Nevertheless, with the downfall of Louis-Philippe began the most brilliant period of her salon. It was also the date of her first hatred. She used to declare that the only man she ever hated with her whole mind and her whole soul was Napoleon III. She certainly did hate him with a rancor that never diminished ; and although, as I have said, she eared very little for polities, and never encouraged political discussions, her salon took a certain tone from this hatred of the Emperor and the empire,

A good grumble is a pleasure to most of us; but to a Frenchman a grumble against the government is the sweetest luxury, and the knowledge that this was to be enjoyed at Madame Mohl’s raised her popularity to high-water mark. Clever, agreeable men, who hated the empire, either from principle or from disappointment, went to the Rue du Bac, and said witty things against " Celui-ci,”as Madame Mohl called the Emperor (accompanying the pronoun with a contemptuous jerk of the thumb over her shoulder), and were sure their wit would be cordially appreciated. Men who would not have met in any other salon, or who, if they had met by chance, would have scowled at one another, came together here as on neutral ground, where they felt as if bound over to keep the peace. Such a field of truce would he impossible nowadays ; it was a phenomenon even at that time ; and since then " what a lot of water has run under the bridge ! ”

The eclectic character of Madame Mohl’s salon (with the single exception of its anti-imperialist tone), together with her being a foreigner, made it easier for her to establish this kind of neutrality. It was essentially a salon d’esprit. No matter what principles you professed, or what party you belonged to, — always with the one exception,— if you had esprit, you were welcome at the Rue du Bac. This was the attraction ; people went there simply for this.

There was no party interest to be served,

— no personal interest, even; young men did not go to get pushed on in their career, to pay court to politicians or men in power ; everybody, young and old, went to he amused and interested. This blight intellectual centre was considerably enriched from the time of Madame Mohl’s marriage by a luminous contingent from the world of science that claimed Julius Mohl as one of its lights. All the distinguished men of letters, all the scientists of Germany,

— Wolfgang Müller, Raumer, Ranke, Tischendorf, Helmholtz,⁹—in fact, the whole company of distinguished Germans, at once became, in the measure of their opportunities, habitués of the Rue du Bac ; while the confrères of the great family of science all over Europe were proud to make acquaintance with Julius Mold’s wife, and swell the long roll of her visitors.

Madame Mohl’s salon now became one of the social features of the period ; and it speaks well for society that it was so. A great deal has been said of the money-making thirst that prevailed under Louis-Philippe, and of the passion for parade and luxury that was developed under the empire; and though these accusations may have been exaggerated, both were in the main true. The eagerness to get rich and the love of display were carried under both those reigns to a point without parallel in modern times. The simplicity which had survived in social and domestic life under LouisPhilippe, owing to the influence of the good and noble queen who presided over his court, quickly vanished under the empire, and gave place to an extravagance of expenditure which changed the whole tone of society, and left on the social life of the nation a mark that is perhaps indelible. The style of dress and entertainment rose so high that it was now not convenable for a lady to appear at an ordinary soirée in a dress that she might with perfect propriety have worn when paying her court to Queen Marie Amélie The reign of crinoline was altogether a disastrous one for the women of France. It invaded their moral life, and lowered their character by lowering their standard. It shifted their field of action and narrowed the scope of their ambition. The ambition of the Frenchwoman, especially of that most accomplished type of the sisterhood, the Parisienne, had always been to shine, to rule her world, and to influence men’s minds by her esprit, and in this she had, for centuries, succeeded. She had been a preponderance in politics, an inspiration in art, an incentive in religion, a moving force wherever man’s head and heart were the instruments to he played upon and the agencies to be stimulated. She had been admired universally for her esprit and her charm ; to sing her praises as “ une femme charvnante,” “ une femme d’esprit,” was the sweetest flattery that could he offered her. But crinoline changed this ideal of feminine vanity. Her ambition, or at any rate her primary preoccupation, henceforward was her dress. The crinoline made this inevitable ; it was a tyranny that imposed itself on the most sensible woman. She was not bold enough to discard it, so she had to submit to it.

Other things rose to the keynote of exaggeration struck by this ugliest fashion that ever caricatured the human form divine. Quiet “ at homes,” with a couple of lamps, glasses of eau sucrée in summer and weak tea in winter, were replaced by expensive buffets and lavish suppers and brilliantly lighted rooms. Such entertainments exacted a great deal of money, both from those who gave and those who accepted them : consequently, those only could see their friends who could afford to spend a great deal of money, or who chose to spend without being able to afford it. The result was, on one side, a sense of géne, irritation, and aching discontent; on the other, the unhealthy elation of vulgar vanity and purse-pride. French society, from being the bright and refined centre that irradiated the whole society of Europe, became an artificial nucleus that blinded it with a false glare. The tone went down in proportion as the standard of extravagance went up. When women had spent so much money on their dresses, they were naturally anxious about the effect the dresses were producing. They had been too much absorbed in preparing this effect to have any leisure for " preparing their conversations,” as some of their pretentious predecessors of the last century were accused of doing; there had been no time for that process of thinking which is the necessary and inevitable preparation of all conversation worthy of the name. With the gentlemen, the fathers and husbands, who had their own share in these preoccupations, the same causes tended to similar results. When they conversed, they were naturally careful to choose the subjects that would be agreeable to their fair companions ; but, as a rule, they did not converse with them ; they kept at a respectful distance, grouping together in doorways, breaking away from all intercourse with the ladies, and leaving the crinolines in undisturbed possession of the floor.

It would obviously be both absurd and unjust to attribute the decay of conversation to the influence of crinoline alone. Crinoline itself was the outcome of lowered social conditions which all tended to that decay. Conversation perished for want of its natural wholesome food and stimulants ; grist fell away from the mill in many directions. Owing to the strained diplomatic relations between other courts and the empire, the foreign element kept aloof: consequently, foreign affairs — literary, social, and political— ceased to furnish materials for talk in drawing-rooms. The aristocracy boudéd the new court as it had boudéd the court of Louis-Philippe. Young men would not enter the public service ; they began to be proud of “ doing nothing ; ” having nothing to do, they had nothing to talk about. Public affairs, la chose publigue, ceased to bo a matter of private interest; impersonal subjects were no longer discussed. When all these reinforcements were withdrawn from conversation, there was so little left for it to feed upon that it naturally dwindled to small talk and gossip.

While society, generally, was being swamped in this slough of frivolity and ostentation, Madame Mohl’s salon stood out iu strong relief, with a character entirely its own. It was a permanent protest against the spirit and tendency of the day ; against pretension, purse-pride, vulgarity in every form. While it was being loudly proclaimed by high and low that luxury had rendered quiet sociability impossible, that the pleasures of conversation were a thing of the past, that unless you could “ entertain,” in the modern sense of the word, no one would come to you, this old woman, without rank or fortune, living in highperched, shabbily-furnished rooms, without either suppers or chandeliers, enjoyed a position unrivaled in its way, and contrived to attract to her house all that was best worth having in Paris. By the sole magnet of her esprit, she drew around her the most remarkable personalities, not only of France, but of the world. Celebrities from every capital in Europe gave one another rendezvous at Madame Mohl’s Friday evenings and Wednesday afternoons. And yet, strangers, who hearing of this salon were at pains to get an introduction there, were sometimes taken by surprise when they entered it for the first time. They found a few quiet people, chiefly gentlemen, and most of them elderly, “ making conversation ” by the light of a couple of lamps, which modest illumination was dimmed by green shades out of consideration, for M. Mold’s eyes.

The one luxury of the room was a great many very comfortable armchairs, of all shapes and sizes. It was a notion of Madame Mold’s that people could not talk their best unless they were comfortably seated. " I like my friends to be snug when they are talking,” she would explain, if she noticed a curious glance wandering over the motley gathering of fauteuils, — a good enough theory in its way (Madame Mold once quoted St. Theresa, rightly or wrongly, in support of it !), but not infallible. Her contemporary, Madame Swetchine, had some good talk in her drawing-room, and only discovered a few days before her death that she had made her friends “ do penance,” as she sweetly said in apologizing for it, on hard chairs for thirty years.

The refreshments on the Friday evenings were on the old-fashioned scale of simplicity and sobriety. On a table in a corner of the room there was a teatray and a plate of biscuits. Except when one of M. Mohl’s charming and accomplished nieces was there, Madame Mohl managed the tea-making herself, even to the boiling of the water, which was done in the drawing-room. She built up a little hot-bed of embers, and set the kettle on it ; and if she detected a smile in the eyes of any guest who watched these preparations, she would say, “ French servants never know when the water boils ; and if by chance they do, they don’t believe it matters a pin to the tea.” As a rule, she let no one help her in the operation, from first to last. There were, however, one or two privileged exceptions, notably Mr. Guy Lestrange and another young Englishman. These gentlemen were allowed to carry the kettle for her; but this was the ouly aid she accepted.

The amount of dress expected of the guests was regulated by that of the hostess. This consisted of a black silk gown, that she had worn all day, and a short skirt, guiltless of the faintest suspicion of crinoline, in an age when to look like a walking balloon was a law of decency to every woman. It was difficult to carry fine clothes, or pretension of any sort, into a salon where the lady of the house received you in this costume, and offered you an armchair that had seen service, showing it, perhaps, a little at the elbows. To pose, or aim at any effect hut an intellectual one, in such an atmosphere was out of the question. Madame Mohl herself was too unobservant of externals to notice what any one wore, unless they were so line as to strike her as “gorgeous,” and consequently “ vulgar and ridiculous, my dear.”

An Englishman, passing through Paris, inquired of a friend who was taking him to the Rue du Bac whether he was expected to appear in a white cravat. “ Madame Mohl would not notice if you appeared without any cravat, ’ was the reply. “ All she expects of you is to he agreeable.”

In truth, to make themselves agreeable was all that she demanded of her guests ; and if she was strict in exacting this, she certainly did all in her power to make compliance easy. She had a charming accueil, cordial, natural, and cheerful. She was glad to see you, — otherwise you would not have been asked, — and she showed it. The moment yon entered the room you felt welcome. Madame Mohl took immense pains with the management of her salon, but it was done so cleverly that you never saw her pulling the wires. She ruled it with a strong hand, too. You were not permitted to be tiresome to yourself or to other people ; you w ere expected to contribute to the general fund, either by talking or listening; you were at liberty to bold your tongue, but you must not be bored ; you were not allowed to sit staring at the company through an eyeglass ; any one who offended in this way was pounced upon at once.

Madame Mohl’s was one of the very few drawing-rooms under the empire where the gentlemen did not form themselves into groups, standing in doorways, and keeping aloof from the ladies all the evening. She never tolerated this habit, which has now, like universal suffrage and other remnants of the empire, taken too deep root, apparently, to be eradicated from the soil of France. Every man who entered Madame Mold’s salon was expected that evening to do his duty, and his duty was to make himself agreeable.

Another unpardonable offense was making tête-à-têtes in corners, or chatting about the room in duets and trios, when conversation, real conversation, was going on. Madame Mohl had no objection to flirtation. She pleaded penitently to having been “a sad flirt” in her day, and was lenient toward those who wished to indulge in the pastime. They were at liberty to do so at their ease in an adjoining room, sacred to this entertainment, as formerly it had been to music or dancing, but the flirtation was not to interfere with the conversation.

Englishmen, and more especially Englishwomen, were a great trial to her in the matter of whispering and chatting. As a rule, English people do not understand the part that listening plays in conversation. They have the reputation of being much more taciturn than the lively French, arid so they are ; but they cannot hold their tongues in a drawingroom and listen, as the French do. This apparent inconsistency may, perhaps, be explained by saying that the English talk, while the French converse. Now, talk is best enjoyed by twos and threes, in snug privacy, without any outside listeners; whereas conversation is a kind of tournament, where two or three perform in presence of company. The English get a deal of genuine happiness out of these eye-to-eye, heart-to-heart, vital talks ; the French find a great amount of keen pleasure in la conversation. The distinction is characteristic of the two races : the former hungering most after that mutual helpful understanding of mind and heart that we call sympathy ; the French delighting in the bright intellectual festival, where they can exercise their wits and other people’s, going down into the lists and fencing and tilting, exhibiting grace and skill and prowess in the exercise, while the spectators “ assist ” in the game, controlling, protesting, cheering, now and then participating directly by throwing down a glove, challenging the combatants, and giving them breathing space.

Madame Mohl had witnessed this delightful game at the Abbaye in its perfection, and even before that, and ever since, had enjoyed practice with the best performers of the day. There were certain rules handed down by tradition, and she insisted on these being strictly observed in her salon. The conversation was conducted in this way: One good talker took possession of the chimneycorner,— that traditional tribune of the French salon,—and threw the ball to somebody ; these two kept it going, occasionally tossing it to any of the company who liked to catch it. Madame Mohl, who never took the tribune in Iter own house, was very clever at catching the ball when it was thrown out, haphazard, in this way : she would seize it and toss it and worry it like a kitten, to the great delight of the principal performers. She knew neither timidity nor mauvaise honte, but would dart into the most learned discussion, like a child, with some comical remark, which perhaps betrayed entire ignorance of the subject, but never failed to enliven it.

The chimney-corner of the Rue du Bac was held habitually by the most brilliant talkers of the day. Ampère, Montalembert, Loménie, Cousin, Thiers, Barthéclomy St. Hilaire, Mignet, etc., in turn glorified that well-worn hearth-rug. Is required no common impudence or stupidity to spoil such sport as this by breaking into tête-à-têtes. Outer barbarians, whose undeveloped instincts led them to prefer these, soon learned to retire into the adjoining room, where they might chatter without disturbing other people’s enjoyment.

Madame Mohl’s own powers of conversation were extraordinary, and quite unique in their way. It would be almost impossible to convey any true idea of the stream of wit, sense, and nonsense that flowed from her as spontaneously and with as little self-consciousness as the sparks fly up from the logs when you stir them. She loved talk, — not talking, — and she was quite willing to talk nonsense, if by doing so she could goad others into talking sense or wit. The mind of a clever man was to her what the soil that contains gems or archædogical remains is to the passionate amateur in these things. She dug away at it with her bright little pickaxe, exulting over every fragment or bit of glittering treasure that it turned up; never giving a thought to how she was performing the digging, or what effect she was producing on the bystanders. Her rôole was chiefly to draw other people out, stimulating them by contradiction, by approval, by criticism, by laughter, but always with inimitable tact. No one knew better than she how to provoke a clever man into shining at the chimney-corner, even if he were not in the mood for it. One evening, Loménie was there. He had been received into the Academy that day, and was consequently the hero of the evening. He was an incomparable talker; but perhaps the pleasurable excitement of the day had tired him, or for some other reason he was disinclined to talk. Madame Mohl, however, had no mind to lose so good an opportunity. Seeing that indirect tactics were of no effect, she said bluntly, “ Allons, Loménie, raconteznous quelqueehose ! ” Loménie obediently began to raconter, and seldom did the hearth-rug witness a more astonishing display of fireworks than he let off that evening.

Madame Mohl was sometimes accused of disliking Englishwomen. It was a most unjust accusation. She loved and admired her countrywomen above all others, and always declared there were no women friends like them ; but she did not care for them at her Friday evenings. “My dear, they have no manners,” she would say. “ I can’t abide them in my drawing-room ! What with their morgue and their shyness and their inability to hold their tongues, they ain’t fit for decent company.”

Once, Mrs. Wynne Finch asked permission to bring a friend on Friday evening. “ My dear,” said Madame Mohl, “ if your friend is a man, bring him without thinking twice about it; but if she is a woman, think well before you bring her, for of all the creatures God ever created none does spoil society like an English lady ! ”

Her favorite protest, delivered with characteristic vehemence, “ I can’t abide women ! ” applied only to silly women. She was just as ready to admire a clever, sympathetic woman as a clever, sympathetic man. She had an odd notion that women were only silly from their own fault; that it was an effect of illwill in them. It was a source of genuine astonishment to her that women were so addicted to idle gossip. “ Why don’t they talk about interesting things? Why don’t they use their brains ? ” she would ask angrily ; and if it were objected that they might have no brains to use, she would retort still more angrily. “ Nonsense ! Everybody but a bora idiot has brains enough not to be a fool. Why don’t they exercise their brains as they do their fingers and their legs, sewing and playing and dancing ? Why don’t they read ? ”

To modest ignorance, especially in the young, she was very gentle and indulgent, and would be very kind in lending books to young girls, and assisting them to make the most of their brains. She even forgave them when they injured or lost valuable books. This was a misdemeanor that M. Mohl dealt more severely with. He divided les honnêtes gens into two categories : those who returned borrowed books, and those who did not. Madame Mohl was very fond of young people, — though boys she professed not to admire. Introducing an English lad to some friends of hers, she writes, “ He is much admired by his parents, and he looks a good boy (for a boy) ; but they are a set of animals I don’t patronize, because they make railroad carriages of my chairs.” Young girls she dearly loved, and entered into their pleasures and feelings with that quick and large sympathy that old people are often wanting in, but which she preserved to the very last. “ These young folk do make me make a goose of myself ! ” she would say, when she was taking some special trouble to amuse or indulge them. The innocent unconsciousness and simplicity of a young girl was to her something exquisite ; she enjoyed these sweet graces in the young as she enjoyed other lovely things. Her sister’s grandchildren afforded her a great fund of this pleasure. “ I have staying with me a niece of sixteen and a half,” she wrote to her dear friend Madame Scherer,¹⁰ many years ago. “ Her father is a clergyman. She has scarcely lived in a town, is very innocent and very intelligent, and curious about everything except common gossip (a rare disposition in woman). I shall keep her now six or eight months, and probably bring her back next winter. I should like her to see a girl of her own age who would be safe, and I am quite sure you would approve of her. She is so innocent in worldly matters that she wonders I don’t return the call of such and such a gentleman whom I like, that he may come again soon ! I hope you do me the justice to guess that I never express any astonishment at these speeches, but say quietly, ‘ It is not the custom.’ I was so pleased with the word ‘ inconsciente ’ that M. Scherer uses, and which is greatly wanted (it suits her particularly ; she is most unconscious). I hope it will obtain right of citizenship.”

Kathleen O’Meara.