Though my father, mother and sisters declined the Sunday invitation of Mrs. Leare, I went to her reception.  The guests were nearly all Italians, Poles, Spaniards or Frenchmen.  There was no Englishman present, but myself, and only one or two Americans.  I felt at once how out of place my mother, the country matron, and my father, ce respectable viellard, would have been in such a circle.  But Mrs. Leare’s guests were not the jeunesse doree nor the dubious nobility I had expected to meet in her salon.  The Frenchmen among them were all men whose names were familiar in French political circles—­men of revolutionary tendencies and of advanced opinions.  I afterward discovered they had taken advantage of Mrs. Leare’s desire to be the head of a salon to use her rooms as a convenient rendezvous.  It was safe ground on which to simmer their revolutionary cauldron.  It was seething and bubbling that night, although neither the Leares nor myself were aware of what was brewing.  The talk was all about the Banquets, especially the impending reform banquet in the Rue Chaillot.  The gentlemen present were not exactly conspirators:  they were for the most part political reformers, who, being cut off from the usual modes of expressing themselves through a recognized parliamentary opposition or by the medium of petition, had devised a system of political banquets, some fifty of which had already been held in the departments, and they were now engaged in getting one up in Paris in the Twelfth arrondissement.

At that time, in a population of thirty-five millions, there were but a quarter of a million of French voters, and as in France all places (from that of a railroad guard to a seat on the bench) were disposed of by the government, it was very easy for ministers to control the legislature.  A reform, really needed in the franchise, was the object proposed to themselves by the original heads of the Revolution of 1848, though when they had set their ball in motion they could neither control it nor keep up with it as it rolled downward.

The prevalent idea in Mrs. Leare’s salon was that the banquet of the Rue Chaillot would go off quietly, that the prefect of police would protest, and that the affair would then pass into the law-courts, where it would remain until all interest in the subject had passed away.  One was sensible, however, that there was a general feeling of excitement in the atmosphere.  Paris swarmed with troops, evidently under stricter discipline than usual.  People looked into each other’s faces interrogatively and read the daily papers with an anxious air.

Though I did not at the time fully appreciate what I saw, I was struck by the business-like character of the men about me.  The guests, I thought, took very little notice of the lady of the house.  I did not then suspect that they were using her hospitality for their own purposes, and that they felt secure in her total incapacity to understand what they were doing.  She, meantime, intent on filling her reception-rooms with celebrities and titled persons, was charmed to have collected so many distinguished men around her.