Casting to the winds her social reputation, her marriage vows, and her maternal affection (she had borne the Comte d’Agoult two children), she suffered herself to be carried off from a ball, and spent the next years of her life wandering over Europe with her lover. Then, having quarrelled with Liszt, she returned to Paris in 1846, and settled down, in the Rue Presbourg, to write under the pseudonym of “Daniel Stern.” Of course all the doors of her aristocratic friends in the Faubourg St. Germain were closed against her. But even before her flight she had made some friends in the _bourgeoisie_; and among them were M. and Mme. Émile de Girardin. Mme. de Girardin, the Countess had known when, as the clever and beautiful Delphine Gay, she was the poetess laureate of the Restoration. Now, married to Émile de Girardin, the Lord Northcliffe of that day, Delphine was one of the most successful of Parisian hostesses. While her mysterious husband, that Napoléon of the Press, that _homme fatal_, of whose origin no one was sure, muffled himself in a shawl and slumbered in a corner of the salon until such time as he should go to his newspaper,[54] the vivacious Mme. de Girardin gathered round her all the great literary celebrities of the hour, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Théophile Gautier and Eugène Sue. And in this brilliant circle, the Countess, ostracised elsewhere, was made warmly welcome. Here she formed her Republican opinions, here she came into contact with the leading figures of that Revolution of 1848, of which she was to become the historian.[55] Here, in Mme. de Girardin’s salon in the Rue Lafitte, the Countess replenished her emptied visiting-list and gathered material for her second salon. With most of this story Juliette had become acquainted through the gossip of Mme. Fauvety’s drawing-room. And what she did not already know was told her by Mme. d’Agoult’s friend, de Ronchaud, whom the Countess had sent to escort the young Mme. Lamessine to the Rue Presbourg. Mme. d’Agoult could not have assigned Juliette a more congenial cavalier. De Ronchaud was a fervent classicist, one of the founders of that new Hellenic school which was just then coming into prominence. His delightful talk about Greek art in the book-shop of Père France on the Quai Voltaire had seduced young Anatole into playing truant from the Collège Stanislas in order to spend a whole day wandering through the Galerie des Antiques in the Louvre. Juliette found de Ronchaud’s conversation equally entrancing. “Our first talk,” she writes, “was one long hymn to Greece.” De Ronchaud promised to introduce his young friend to other Hellenists, and he foretold that together they would bring about a second Renaissance.