Mme. Recamier, although in date all but the contemporary of Mme. Lebrun, is, in her position of mistress of a salon, essentially the impersonation of a foible peculiar to the present day; she typifies the class of women who, in Paris, are absolutely absorbed by the thought of their salons, for whom to receive is to live, and who are ready to expire at the notion of any celebrity not being a frequenter of their tea-table.  Mme. Nodier’s—­and here, as with Mme. Gerard, we must substitute the husband for the wife, and say Charles Nodier’s—­salon was the menagerie whither thronged all the strange beings who, after the Revolution of July, fancied they had some special and extraordinary “call” in the world of Art.  Nodier’s receptions at the Arsenal represent the literary and artistic movement of 1830.

To begin, then, with Mme. Lebrun.  This lady was precisely one of those individualities who, since the days of Louis XIV., had found it easy to take their place in French society, who, under the ancien regime, were the equals of the whole world, and who, since “Equality” has been so formally decreed by the laws of the land, would have found it impossible, under the Citizen King, Louis Philippe, or under the so-called “Democratic Empire” of Louis Napoleon, to surround themselves with any society save that of a perfectly inferior description.

Mme. Lebrun was the daughter of a very second-rate painter of the name of Vigee, the sister of a poet of some talent of the same name, and was married young to a picture-dealer of large fortune and most expensive and dissipated, not to say dissolute habits, M. Lebrun.  She was young,—­and, like Mme. Recamier and a few others, remained youthful to a very late term of her existence,—­remarkably beautiful, full of talent, grace, and esprit, and possessed of the magnificent acquirements as a portrait-painter that have made her productions to this day valuable throughout the galleries of Europe.  She was very soon so brilliantly in fashion, that there was not a grand seigneur of the court, a grande dame of the queen’s intimacy, a rich fermier-general, or a famous writer, artist, or savant, who did not petition to be admitted to her soirees; and in her small apartment, in the Rue de Clery, were held probably the last of those intimate and charmingly unceremonious reunions which so especially characterized the manners of the high society of France when all question of etiquette was set aside.  The witty Prince de Ligne, the handsome Comte de Vaudreuil, the clever M. de Boufflers, and his step-son, M. de Sabran, with such men as Diderot, d’Alembert, Marmontel, and Laharpe, were the original habitues of Mme. Lebrun’s drawing-room.  At the same time used to visit her the bitter, bilious, discontented David, the painter, who, though very young, was annoyed at a woman having such incontestable proficiency