in his own art, and whose democratic ideas were hurt at her receiving such a number of what he styled “great people.”  Madame Lebrun, one day,—­little dreaming that she was addressing a future coupe-tete of the most violent species, (perhaps the only genuine admirer of Marat,)—­said, smilingly, to the future painter of Les Sabines, “David, you are wretched because you are neither Duke nor Marquis.  I, to whom all such titles are absolutely indifferent, I receive with sincere pleasure all who make themselves agreeable.”  The apostrophe apparently hit home, for David never returned to Mme. Lebrun’s house, and was no well-wisher of hers in later times.  But on this occasion she had not only told the truth to an individual, she had touched upon the secret sore of the nation and the time; and vast classes were already brooding in silence over the absurd, vain, and empty regret at being “neither Duke nor Marquis.”  The Revolution was at hand, and the days rapidly approaching when all such pleasant assemblies as those held by Mme. Lebrun would become forever impossible.  At some of these, the crowd of intimates, and of persons all acquainted with each other, was so great, that the highest dignitaries of the realm had to content themselves with sitting down upon the floor; and on one occasion, the Marechal de Noailles, who was of exceedingly large build, had to request the assistance of several of his neighbors before he could be brought from his squatting attitude to his feet again.

Mme. Lebrun emigrated, like the majority of her associates,—­going to Russia, to Italy, to Germany, to England, and everywhere increasing the number of her friends, besides preserving all those of former times, whom she sedulously sought out in their voluntary exile, and to whom, in many cases, she even proved an invaluable friend.  In the commencement of the Restoration, Mme. Lebrun returned to France, and established herself definitively at Paris, and at Louveciennes near Marly, where she had a delightful summer residence.  Here, as in her salons in the metropolis, she tried to bring back the tone of French society to what it had been before the Revolution, and to show the younger generations what had been the gayety, the grace, the affability, the exquisite good-breeding of those who had preceded them.  The men and women of her own standing seconded her, but the younger ones were not to be drawn into high-heartedness; and an observer might have had before him the somewhat strange spectacle of old age gay, gentle, unobservant of any stiff formality, and of youth preoccupied and grave, and, instead of being refined in manners, pedantic.  “The younger frequenters of Mme. Lebrun’s salon,” says Mme. Ancelot, “were strangers to the world into which they found themselves raised; those who surrounded them were of an anterior civilization; they could not grow to be identified with a past which was unknown to them, or known only through recitals