and there surprised you in Delphine de Girardin’s productions, and, as Jules Janin once said, “One would think the variegated plumes of Murat’s fantastic hat[2] were sweeping through her brains!” This was her mother’s doing.  Delphine, who had never lived during one hour of the glory of the Empire, had, through the medium of her mother, acquired a slight tinge of its boursouflure; and had it not been for her own personal good taste, she would have been misled precisely by her strong lyrical aptitudes.  Madame Gay found in Gerard’s salon all the people she had best known in her youth, and she was delighted to have her early years recalled to her.  Mme. Ancelot, who, like many of her country women, felt a marked antipathy for Madame Gay, has given a very true portrait of both mother and daughter.

“Many years after,” she writes, “when these ladies were (through M. de Girardin) at the head of one of the chief organs of the Paris press, they were much flattered and courted; at the period I speak of” (about 1817-1825) “their position was far from brilliant, and Mme. Gay was far from popular.  Every word that fell from her mouth, uttered in a sharp tone, and full of bitterness and envy, went to speak ill of others and prodigiously well of herself.  She had a mania for titles and tuft-hunting, and could speak of no one under a marquis, a count, or a baron.  Her daughter’s beauty and talents caused her afterwards to be more generally admitted into society; but at this period she was avoided by most people.”

Her daughter’s beauty was certainly marvellous, and when, under the reign of Louis Philippe, American society had in Paris more than one brilliant representative and more than one splendid centre of hospitality, where all that was illustrious in the society of France perpetually flocked, we make no doubt many of our countrymen noticed, whether at theatre or concert or ball, the really queenlike air of Mme. de Girardin, and the exquisitely classic profile, which, enframed, as it were, by the capricious spirals of the lightest, fairest flaxen hair, resembled the outline of some antique statue of a Muse.

Delphine Gay and her mother were more the ornaments of the salon of the Duchesse d’Abrantes, perhaps, than of that of Gerard; and as the former continued open long after the latter was closed by death, not only the young girl, whose verses were so immensely in fashion during the Restoration, was one of the constant guests of Junot’s widow, but she continued to be so as the wife of Emile de Girardin, the intelligent and enterprising founder of the newspaper “La Presse.”