A brilliant crowd of ministers and diplomatists, and artists and pamphleteers, and wits and beautiful women; perishable and perished things, out of which we must select one or two, either as types of that which has perished, or as types of the imperishable; and the perished, the amiable and beautiful women, the amusing and brilliantly-improvising orators and philosophers of the half-hour, are often that which, could we have chosen, we should have preserved. Most notable among the women, the young daughter of Necker, the wife of the Swedish ambassador, Mme. la Baronne de Stael Holstein: a rather mannish superb sort of creature, with shoulders and arms compensating for thick swarthy features; eyes like volcanoes; the laugh of the most kind-hearted of children; the stride, the attitude, with her hands for ever behind the back, of an unceremonious man; a young woman already accounted a genius, and felt to be a moral force. Next to her a snub, drab-coloured Livonian, with northern eyes telling of future mysticism, that Mme. de Kruedener, as yet noted only for the droll contrast of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and the simplicity of nature with her quarterly bills of twenty thousand francs from Mdlle. Bertin, the Queen's milliner; but later to be famous for her literary and religious vagaries, her influence on Mme. de Stael, her strange influence on Alexander of Russia. Near her, doubtless, that fascinating Suard, in the convent of whose sister Mme. de Kruedener was wont to spend a month in religious exercises, thanking God, at the foot of the altar, for giving her a sister like Mdlle. Suard, and a lover like Suard himself. As yet but little noticed, except as the pet friend, the "younger sister" of Mme. d'Albany, a Mme. de Flahault, later married to the Portuguese Souza; a simple-natured little woman, adoring her children and the roses in her garden, and who, if I may judge by the letters which, many, many years later, she addressed to Mme. d'Albany, would be the woman of all those one would rather resuscitate for a friend, leaving Mmes. de Stael and de Kruedener quiet in their coffins. Further on, the delicate and charming Pauline de Beaumont, who was to be the Egeria of Joubert and the tenderly-beloved friend of Chateaubriand; and a host of women notable in those days for wit or heart or looks, wherewith to make a new Ballade of Dead Ladies, much sadder than the one of Villon: "But where are the snows of yester-year?"