I certainly was not prepared for the names which I now heard successively announced.  Instead of the moderate condition from which I had supposed Mordecai and his pretty daughter, aspiring as she was, to have chosen their society, I found myself in a circle of names of which the world had been talking since I was in my cradle, if not for a dozen centuries before.  I was in the midst of dukes, counts, and chevaliers, marechals and marchionesses, the patrons and patronesses of the Marmontels and D’Alemberts, the charm of the Du Deffand soirees, and the originals for the charming piquancies and exquisite impertinences of L’Espinasse, and the coterieisme of Paris.

All that I had seen of the peerage of our haughty country was dim and dull to the gay glitter of the crowd around me.  Nature never moulded two national characters so distinct in all points, but the French exterior carries all before it.  Diamonds and decorations sparkled on every side.  The dresses of the women were as superb as if they had never known fear or flight; and the conversation was as light, sportive, and badinant, as if we were all waiting in the antechamber of Versailles till the chamberlain of Marie Antoinette should signify the royal pleasure to receive us.  Here was stateliness to the very summit of human pride, but it was softened by the taste of its display; the most easy familiarity, yet guarded by the most refined distinctions The bon-mot was uttered with such natural avoidance of offence, and the arch allusion was so gracefully applied, that the whole gave me the idea of a new use of language.  They were artistes of conversation, professors of a study of society, as much as painters might be of the style of the Bolognese or the Venetian school.

I was delighted, but I was still more deeply interested; for the chief topics of the evening were those on which public curiosity was most anxiously alive at the moment—­the hazards of the revolutionary tempest, which they had left raging on the opposite shore.  Yet, “Vive la France!” we had our cotillon, and our songs to harp and piano, notwithstanding the shock of governments.

But we had scarcely sat down to the supper which Mordecai’s hospitality and his daughter’s taste had provided for us—­and a most costly display of plate and pine-apples it was—­when our entertainer was called out of the room by a new arrival.  After some delay, he returned, bringing in with him a middle-aged officer, a fine soldierly-looking figure, in the uniform of the royal guard.  He had just arrived from France with letters for some of the party, and with an introduction to the Jew, whom I now began to regard as an agent of the French princes.  The officer was known to the whole table; and the enquiries for the fate of their friends and France were incessant and innumerable.  He evidently suppressed much, to avoid “a scene;” yet what he had to tell was sufficiently alarming.  The ominous shake of the Jew’s head, and the changes of his sagacious visage, showed me that he at least thought the evil day on the point of completion.