From 1815 to 1830, the _noblesse_ had officially the advantage. From 1830 to 1848, the _bourgeoisie_ ruled over the land. But now was to be remarked another social phenomenon, that complicated _salon_ life more than ever. The middle classes, we say, were in power; they were in all the centres of political life,--in the Chambers, in the ministries, in the king's councils, in diplomacy; and with them had risen to importance the Imperial aristocracy, whose representatives were to be found in every department of the public service. All this while, the old families of the _ancien régime_ shut themselves up among themselves entirely, constituted what is now termed the _Faubourg St. Germain_, which never was so exclusive or so powerful (socially speaking) as under Louis Philippe, and a tacit combat between envy and disdain was carried on, such as perhaps no modern civilization ever witnessed. The Faubourg St. Germain arrogated to itself the privilege of exclusively representing _la société Française_, and it must be confessed that the behavior of its adversaries went far to substantiate its claims. Our purpose in these pages is not to touch upon anything connected with politics, or we could show, that, whilst apparently severed from all activity upon the more conspicuous field of the capital, the ancient French families were employed in reëstablishing their influence in the rural provincial centres; the result of which was the extraordinary influx of Legitimist members into the Chamber formed by the first Republican elections in 1848. But this is foreign to our present aim. As to what regards French _society_, properly so called, it was, from 1804, after the proclamation of the Empire, till 1848, after the fall of Louis Philippe, in gradual but incessant course of sub-division into separate cliques, each more or less bitterly disposed towards the others. From the moment when this began to be the case, the edifice of French society could no longer be studied as a whole, and it only remained to examine its component parts as evidences of the tendencies of various classes in the nation. In this assuredly not uninteresting study, Mme. Ancelot's book is of much service; for a certain number of the different _salons_ she names are, as it were, types of the different stages civilization has attained to in the city which chooses to style itself "the brain of Europe."