Madame Tallien, Madame Recamier, and Madame de Stael, reorganized society, and all were anxious to obtain admission to their parlors.  To be sure, these entertainments and reunions still wore a sufficiently strange and fantastic appearance.  Fashion, which had so long been compelled to give way to the carmagnole and red cap, endeavored to avenge its long banishment by all manner of caprices and humors, and in doing so assumed a political, reactionary aspect. Coiffures a la Jacobine were now supplanted by coiffures a la victime and au repentir.  In order to exhibit one’s taste for the fine arts, the draperies of the statues of Greece and ancient Rome were now worn.  Grecian fetes were given, at which the black soup of Lycurgus was duly honored, and Roman feasts which, in splendor and extravagance, rivalled those of Lucullus.  These Roman feasts were particularly in vogue at the palace of Luxembourg, where the directors of the republic had now taken up their residence, and where Madame Tallien exhibited to the new French society the new wonders of luxury and fashion.  Too proud to wear the generally-adopted costume of the Grecian republic, Madame Tallien chose the attire of the Roman patrician lady; and the gold-embroidered purple robes, and the golden tiara in her black, shining hair, gave to the charming and beautiful daughter of the republic the magnificence of an empress.  She had also drawn around her a splendid court.  All eagerly pressed forward to pay their respects to and obtain the good will of the mighty wife of the mighty Tallien.  Her house was the great point of attraction to all those who occupied prominent positions in Paris, or aspired to such.  While in the parlors of Madame Recamier, who, despite the revolution, had remained a zealous royalist, the past and the good time of the Bourbons were whispered of, and witty and often sanguinary bon mots at the expense of the republic uttered—­while in Madame de Stael’s parlors art and science had found an asylum—­Madame Tallien and court lived for the present, and basked in the splendor with which she knew how to invest the palace of the dictators of France.

In the mean while, Viscountess Josephine Beauharnais had been living, with her children, in quiet retirement, a prey to sad memories.  A day came, however, when she was compelled to tear herself from this last consolation of the unhappy, the brooding over the sorrows and losses of the past, or see her children become the victims of misery and want.  The time had come when she must leave her retirement, and step, as a petitioner, before those who had the power to grant, as a favor, that which was hers by right, and restore to her, at least in part, her sequestered estate.  Josephine had known Madame Tallien when she was still Madame de Fontenay, and it now occurred to her that she might assist her in her attempt to recover the inheritance of her father.  Madame Tallien, the “Merveilleuse de Luxembourg,”