’When a young lady comes out I know beforehand how her mother and her aunts will describe her.  “Elle a les gouts simples.  Elle est pieuse.  Elle aime la campagne.  Elle aime la lecture.  Elle n’aime pas le bal.  Elle n’aime pas le monde, elle y ira seulement pour plaire a sa mere.”  I try sometimes to escape from these generalities, but there is nothing behind them.’

‘And how long,’ I asked, ’does this simple, pious, retiring character last?’

‘Till the orange flowers of her wedding chaplet are withered,’ he answered.  ‘In three months she goes to the messe d’une heure.’

‘What is the “messe d’une heure?"’ I asked.

‘A priest,’ he answered, ’must celebrate Mass fasting; and in strictness ought to do so before noon.  But to accommodate fashionable ladies who cannot rise by noon, priests are found who will starve all the morning, and say Mass in the afternoon.  It is an irregular proceeding, though winked at by the ecclesiastical authorities.  Still to attend it is rather discreditable; it is a middle term between the highly meritorious practice of going to early Mass, and the scandalous one of never going at all.’

‘What was the education,’ I asked, ‘of women under the ancien regime?’

‘The convent,’ he answered.

‘It must have been better,’ I said, ’than the present education, since the women of that time were superior to ours.’

‘It was so far better,’ he answered, ’that it did no harm.  A girl at that time was taught nothing.  She came from the convent a sheet of white paper. Now her mind is a paper scribbled over with trash.  The women of that time were thrown into a world far superior to ours, and with the sagacity, curiosity, and flexibility of French women, caught knowledge and tact and expression from the men.

‘I knew well,’ he continued, ’Madame Recamier.  Few traces of her former beauty then remained, but we were all her lovers and her slaves.  The talent, labour, and skill which she wasted in her salon, would have gained and governed an empire.  She was virtuous, if it be virtuous to persuade every one of a dozen men that you wish to favour him, though some circumstance always occurs to prevent your doing so.  Every friend thought himself preferred.  She governed us by little distinctions, by letting one man come five minutes before the others, or stay five minutes after.  Just as Louis XIV. raised one courtier to the seventh heaven by giving him the bougeoir, and another by leaning on his arm, or taking his shirt from him.

’She said little, but knew what each man’s fort was, and placed from time to time a mot which led him to it.  If anything were peculiarly well said, her face brightened.  You saw that her attention was always active and always intelligent.

’And yet I doubt whether she really enjoyed conversation. Tenir salon was to her a game, which she played well, and almost always successfully, but she must sometimes have been exhausted by the effort.  Her salon was perhaps pleasanter to us than it was to herself.