LES SALONS DE PARIS.[1]

The title is an ambitious one, for the salons of Paris are Paris itself; and, from the days of the Fronde and of the Hotel Rambouillet down to our own, you may judge pretty accurately of what is going on upon the great political stage of France by what is observable in those green-rooms and coulisses called the Parisian drawing-rooms, and where, more or less, the actors of all parties may be seen, either rehearsing their parts before the performance, or seeking, after the performance is over, the several private echoes of the general public sentiment that has burst forth before the light of the foot-lamps.  Shakspeare’s declaration, that “all the world’s a stage,” is nowhere so true as in the capital of Gaul.  There, most truly may it be said, are

  ——­“All the men and women merely players;
  They have their exits and their entrances,
  And one man in his time plays many parts.”

Therefore might a profound and comprehensive study of the drawing-rooms of Paris be in a manner a history of France in our own times.

Madame Ancelot’s little volume does not aim so high; nor, had it done so, would its author have possessed the talent requisite for carrying out such a design.  Madame Ancelot is a writer of essentially second-rate and subordinate capacity, and consequently her account of those salons de Paris that she has seen (and she by no means saw them all) derives no charm from the point of view she takes.  To say the truth, she has no “point of view” of her own; she tells what she saw, and (thus far we must praise her) she tells it very conscientiously.  Having waited in every instance till the people she has to speak of were dead, Mme. Ancelot has a pretty fair field before her for the display of her sincerity, and we, the public, who are neither kith nor kin of the deceased, are the gainers thereby.

So interesting and so amusing is the subject Madame Ancelot has chosen, that, in spite of her decided want of originality or even talent in treating it, her book is both an amusing and an interesting one.  It is even more than that; for those who wish to have a correct notion of certain epochs of the social civilization of modern France, and of certain predominant types in French society during the last forty years, Madame Ancelot’s little volume is full of instruction.  Perhaps in no society, so much as in that of France, have the political convulsions of the state reacted so forcibly upon the relations of man to man, revolutionizing the homes of private persons, even as the government and the monarchy were revolutionized.  In England, nothing of this kind is to be observed; and if you study English society ten years, or twenty years, or fifty years after the fall of Charles I., after the establishment of the Commonwealth, or after the restoration of Charles II., the definitive exile of