The drawing-rooms of Paris had opened like magic before the "sesame" of Thermidor and the prospects of settled order under the Directory. There were visiting, dining, and dancing; dressing, flirtation, and intrigue; walking, driving, and riding--all the avocations of a people soured with the cruel and bloody past, and reasserting its native passion for pleasure and refinement. All classes indulged in the wildest speculation, securities public and corporate were the sport of the exchange, the gambling spirit absorbed the energies of both sexes in desperate games of skill and chance. The theaters, which had never closed their doors even during the worst periods of terror, were thronged from pit to gallery by a populace that reveled in excitement. The morality of the hour was no better than the old; for there was a strange mixture of elements in this new society. The men in power were of every class--a few of the old aristocracy, many of the wealthy burghers, a certain proportion of the colonial nabobs from the West Indies and elsewhere, adventurers of every stripe, a few even of the city populace, and some country common folk. The purchase and sale of the confiscated lands, the national domain which furnished a slender security for the national debt and depreciated bonds, had enriched thousands of the vulgar sort. The newly rich lost their balance and their stolidity, becoming as giddy and frivolous and aggressive as the worst. The ingredients of this queer hodgepodge had yet to learn one another's language and nature; the niceties of speech, gesture, and mien which once had a well-understood significance in the higher circles of government and society were all to be readjusted in accordance with the ideas of the motley crowd and given new conventional currency. In such a disorderly transition vice does not require the mask of hypocrisy, virtue is helpless because unorganized, and something like riot characterizes conduct. The sound and rugged goodness of many newcomers, the habitual respectability of the veterans, were for the moment alike inactive because not yet kneaded into the lump they had to leaven.