Madame Ancelot is right here, and there were in Paris several of these salons, which served as the models for those of all the rest of Europe.  Under the Restoration, two illustrious ladies tried to recall to the generation that had sprung from the Empire or from emigration what the famous salons of old had once been, and the Duchesse de Duras and the Marquise de Montcalm (sister to the then minister, the Duc de Richelieu) drew around them all that was in any way distinguished in France.  But the many causes we have noted above made the enterprise a difficult one, and the various divergences of society, politically speaking, rendered the task of the mistress of a house one of surpassing arduousness.  Mme. de Stael, who, by her very superiority perhaps,—­certainly by her vehemence,—­was prevented from ever being a perfect example of what was necessary in this respect, acquired the nickname of Presidente de Salons; and it would appear, that, with her resolute air, her loud voice, and her violent opinions, she really did seem like a kind of speaker of some House of Commons disguised as a woman.  That the management of a salon was no easy affair the following anecdote will prove.  The Duchesse de Duras one day asked M. de Talleyrand what he thought of the evening reunions at her house, and after a few words of praise, he added:  “But you are too vivacious as yet, too young.  Ten years hence you will know better how to manage it all.”  Mme. de Duras was then somewhere about fifty-four or five!  We perceive, therefore, that, according to M. de Talleyrand, the proper manner of receiving a certain circle of habitues was likely to be the study of a whole life.

We select from Mme. Ancelot’s book sketches of the following maitresses de maison, because they seem to us the types of the periods of transformation to which they correspond in the order of date:—­Mme. Lebrun, Mme. Gerard, Mme. d’Abrantes, Mme. Recamier, Mme. Nodier.  Mme. Lebrun corresponds to the period when Pre-Revolutionary traditions were still in force, and when the remembrance yet subsisted of a society that had been a real and not a fictive unity.  Mme. Gerard—­or we should rather say her husband, for she occupied herself little with her guests, whom the illustrious painter entertained—­represents the period of the Empire, prolonging itself into the Restoration, and seeking by the immunities of talent and intelligence to bring the two regimes to meet upon what might be termed neutral ground.  Mme. d’Abrantes is the type of that last remnant of the half-heroic, half-sentimental epoch which tried to endure even after the first days of 1830, and of which certain verses of Delphine Gay, certain impossible portraits of invincible colonels, certain parts played by the celebrated Elleviou, and the Troubadourish “Partant pour la Syrie” of Queen Hortense, are emblematical.