the Parisian salons.  I recognised the style of Buffon and Rousseau in a crowd of their successors; and the most important knowledge was frequently communicated in language the most eloquent and captivating.  Even the mixture of society which had been created by the Revolution, gave an original force and freshness to these assemblies, infinitely more attractive than the most elaborate polish of the old regime.  Brissot, the common printer, but a man of singular strength of thought, there figured by Condorcet, the noble and the man of profound science.  St Etienne, the little bustling partizan, yet the man of talent, mingled with the chief advocates of the Parisian courts; or Servan fenced with his subtle knowledge of the world against Vergniaud, the romantic Girondist, but the most Ciceronian of orators.  Talleyrand, already known as the most sarcastic of men, and Maury, by far the most powerful debater of France since Mirabeau—­figured among the chief ornaments of the salons of De Stael.  Roland, and the showy and witty Theresa Cabarrus, and even the flutter of La Fayette, the most tinsel of heroes, and the sullen sententiousness of Robespierre, then known only as a provincial deputy, furnished a background which increased the prominence of the grouping.

But the greatest wonder of France still escaped the general eye.  At a ball at the Hotel de Stael, I remember to have been struck with the energetic denunciation of some rabble insult to the Royal family, by an officer whom nobody knew.  As a circle were standing in conversation on the topic of the day, the little officer started from his seat, pushed into the group, and expressed his utter contempt for the supineness of the Government on those occasions, so strongly, as to turn all eyes upon him.  “Where were the troops, where the guns?” he exclaimed.  “If such things are suffered, all is over with royalty; a squadron of horse, and a couple of six pounders, would have swept away the whole swarm of scoundrels like so many flies.”  Having thus discharged his soul, he started back again, flung himself into a chair, and did not utter another word through the evening.  I little dreamed that in that meagre frame, and long, thin physiognomy, I saw Napoleon.

I must hasten to other things.  Yet I still cast many a lingering glance over these times.  The vividness of the collision was incomparable.  The wit, the eccentricity, the anecdote, the eloquence of those assemblages, were of a character wholly their own.  They had, too, a substantial nutriment, the want of which had made the conversation of the preceding age vapid, with all its elegance.—­Public events of the most powerful order fed the flame.  It was the creation of a vast national excitement; the rush of sparks from the great electrical machine, turned by the hands of thirty millions.  The flashes were still but matters of sport and surprise.  The time was nigh when those flashes were to be fatal, and that gay lustre was to do the work of conflagration.