that disfigured it....  Amidst the remnants of a society that had been historical, there was, as it were, the breath of a spirit born of our days; new ideas, new opinions, new hopes, nay, even new recollections, were evident all around, and served to render social unity impossible; but, above all, what failed in this one particular centre was youth,—­there were few or no young people.”  This was perfectly true; and Mme. Lebrun’s salon is interesting only from the fact of its being the last, perhaps, in which French people of our day can have acquired a complete notion of what the Pre-Revolutionary salons of France were.

The evening reunions at the house of Gerard, the celebrated painter, were among the most famous features of the society of the Restoration.  The gatherings at Mmes. de Duras’s and de Montcalm’s splendid hotels were all but exclusively political and diplomatic; whereas at Gerard’s there was a mixture of these with the purely mundane and artistic elements, and, above all, there was a portion of Imperialist fame blended with all the rest, that was hard to be found anywhere else.  Gerard, too, had painted the portraits of so many crowned heads, and been so much admitted into the intimacy of his royal models, that, whenever a foreigner of any note visited Paris, he almost immediately asked to be put in a way to be invited to the celebrated artist’s Wednesday receptions.  This was, to a certain degree, an innovation in regular French society; the French being most truly, as has been said, the “Chinese of Europe,” and liking nothing less than the intermixture with themselves of anything foreign.  But Gerard was one of those essentially superior men who are able to influence those around them, and bring them to much whereto no one else could have persuaded them.  Gerard, like many celebrated persons, was infinitely superior to what he did.  As far as what he did was concerned, Gerard, though a painter of great merit, was far inferior to two or three of whom France has since been justly proud; but in regard to what he was, Gerard was a man of genius, who had in many ways few superiors.  Few men, even in France, have so highly deserved the reputation of un homme d’esprit.  He was as spirituel as Talleyrand himself, and almost as clear-sighted and profound.  Add to this that nothing could surpass the impression made by Gerard at first sight.  He was strikingly like the first Napoleon, but handsomer; with the same purity of outline, the same dazzlingly lustrous eyes, full of penetration and thought, but with a certain sympathetic charm about his whole person that the glorious conqueror of Marengo and Dictator of Gaul never possessed.