were less moral; society was lenient to the fraud of the millionaire, pharisaically severe to the woman whose heart had led her astray. "The previous generation had not," as one of the historians of the day observes, "placed under the ban of society either the priest who forsook his church or the woman who forsook her husband, so long as their motives were unselfish; now it was the sign of _mauvais ton_ to desire the re-institution of divorce, not to mention the marriage of priests." The Faubourg St. Honoré, the quarter of the financiers, set the tone. Little wonder that the umbrella soon became the symbol of this monarchy, and the expression _Juste-milieu_--which the King had once cleverly used in speaking of the policy that ought to be employed--the nickname for everything weak and inefficient, for a power without lustre and dignity. If we take the decade 1825-35 as a whole, it is easy to understand how hopeless it must have seemed from the aesthetic point of view. [1] Expressions used by Heinrich Heine, who witnessed the scene and instituted the parallel. II THE GENERATION OF 1830 It is against this grey background, this foil of Legitimist cowls and Louis-Philippe umbrellas--in this society where the new-born power of capital, strong as Hercules, has, even in its cradle, strangled all the external romance of life--on this stage upon the grey walls of which an invisible finger has written in grey letters the word _Juste-milieu_--that a fiery, glowing, noisy literature, a literature enamoured of scarlet and of passion, suddenly makes its appearance. All the conditions were present in combination which were certain to impel young, restless minds towards romantic enthusiasm, towards ardent contempt for public opinion, towards worship of unbridled passion and unrestrained genius. Hatred of the bourgeoisie (as in Germany a generation earlier hatred of the Philistines) becomes the watchword of the day. But whereas the word "Philistine" conjures up a picture of the chimney-corner and the pipe, the word "bourgeois" at once suggests the omnipotence of economic interests. Its essential antipathy to utilitarianism and plutocracy turned the intellectual current of the day, in the case of the men of talent already before the public, and still more strongly in the case of the budding geniuses, in the direction of antagonism to everything existing and accepted, at the same time mightily increasing the force of the current. The religion of art, and enthusiasm for liberty in art, suddenly took possession of all hearts. Art was the highest, art was light, art was fire, art was all in all; its beauty and audacity alone imparted value to life.