The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 10, August, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 10, August, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
brought from his squatting attitude to his feet again.
Mme. Lebrun emigrated, like the majority of her associates,--going to
Russia, to Italy, to Germany, to England, and everywhere increasing
the number of her friends, besides preserving all those of former
times, whom she sedulously sought out in their voluntary exile, and to
whom, in many cases, she even proved an invaluable friend. In the
commencement of the Restoration, Mme. Lebrun returned to France, and
established herself definitively at Paris, and at Louveciennes near
Marly, where she had a delightful summer residence. Here, as in her
salons in the metropolis, she tried to bring back the tone of French
society to what it had been before the Revolution, and to show the
younger generations what had been the gayety, the grace, the
affability, the exquisite good-breeding of those who had preceded
them. The men and women of her own standing seconded her, but the
younger ones were not to be drawn into high-heartedness; and an
observer might have had before him the somewhat strange spectacle of
old age gay, gentle, unobservant of any stiff formality, and of youth
preoccupied and grave, and, instead of being refined in manners,
pedantic. "The younger frequenters of Mme. Lebrun's salon," says
Mme. Ancelot, "were strangers to the world into which they found
themselves raised; those who surrounded them were of an anterior
civilization; they could not grow to be identified with a past which
was unknown to them, or known only through recitals that disfigured
it.... Amidst the remnants of a society that had been historical,
there was, as it were, the breath of a spirit born of our days; new
ideas, new opinions, new hopes, nay, even new recollections, were
evident all around, and served to render social unity impossible; but,
above all, what failed in this one particular centre was youth,--there
were few or no young people." This was perfectly true; and
Mme. Lebrun's _salon_ is interesting only from the fact of its
being the last, perhaps, in which French people of our day can have
acquired a complete notion of what the Pre-Revolutionary _salons_
of France were.
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