The eccentric personage we have just spoken of—­the Duchesse d’Abrantes—­died in the year 1838, in a garret, upon a truckle-bed, provided for her by the charity of a friend.  The royal family paid the expenses of her funeral, and Chateaubriand, accompanied by nearly every celebrity of the literary world, followed on foot behind her coffin, from the church to the burying-ground.

Madame d’Abrantes may be considered as the inventor, in France, of what has since become so widely spread under the name of les salons picaresques, and of what, at the present day, is famous under the appellation of the demi-monde.  Her example has been followed by numberless imitators, and now, instead of presuming (as was the habit formerly) that those only receive who are rich enough to do so, it is constantly inquired, when any one in Paris opens his or her house, whether he or she is ruined, and whether the soirees given are meant merely to throw dust into people’s eyes.  The history of the tea-spoons—­so singular at the moment of its occurrence—­has since been parodied a hundred times over, and sometimes by mistresses of houses whose fortune was supposed to put them far above all such expedients.  Madame d’Abrantes, we again say, was the founder of a genre in Paris society, and as such is well worth studying.  The genre is by no means the most honorable, but it is one too frequently found now in the social centres of the French capital for the essayist on Paris salons to pass it over unnoticed.

The salon of Mme. Recamier is one of a totally different order, and the world-wide renown of which may make it interesting to the reader of whatever country.  As far as age was concerned, Mme. Recamier was the contemporary of Mme. d’Abrantes, of Gerard, nay, almost of Mme. Lebrun; for the renown of her beauty dates from the time of the French Revolution, and her early friendships associate her with persons who even had time to die out under the first Empire; but the salon of Madame Recamier was among the exclusively modern ones, and enjoyed all its lustre and its influence only after 1830.  The cause of this is obvious:  the circumstance that attracted society to Mme. Recamier’s house was no other than the certainty of finding there M. de Chateaubriand.  He was the divinity of the temple, and the votaries flocked around his shrine.  Before 1830 the temple had been elsewhere, and, until her death, Mme. la Duchesse de Duras was the high-priestess of the sanctuary, where a few privileged mortals only were admitted to bow down before the idol.  It is inconceivable how easy a certain degree of renown finds it in Paris to establish one of these undisputed sovereignties, before which the most important, highest, most considerable individualities abdicate their own merit, and prostrate themselves in the dust.  M. de Chateaubriand in no way justified the kind of worship that was paid him, nor did he even