We never heard whether this Englishman afterwards corrected his first impressions of French women, but quite likely he never did, for there is nothing so difficult on earth as for an Englishman to get over first impressions, and especially is this the case in relation to everything in France. An aristocratic Englishman may live years in Paris without really knowing anything about it. In the first place, he goes there with letters of introduction to the Faubourg St. Germain, where he finds only the fossil remains of the old noblesse, intermixed with a slight proportion of the actual intelligence of the country, and here he moves round in the stagnant circles of historical France, and it is a wonder if he gets so much as a glimpse of the living progressive Paris. There is nothing on earth, unless it be a three-thousand-year-old mummy, that is so grim and stiff and shrivelled, as the pure old French nobility. France is at present the possessor of three separate and opposing nobilities. First, there is the nobility of the Empire, the Napoleonic nobility, which is based on military and civil genius; second, there is the Orleans nobility, the family of the late Louis-Philippe, represented in the person of the young Comte de Paris; third, the Legitimists, or the old aristocracy of the Bourbon stock, represented in the person of Henry V, Duc de Bordeaux, now some fifty years old, and laid snugly away in exile in Italy.
No description which I can give can convey a just idea of the fascination of society among such wits as Dejazet; and nowhere do you find that kind of society so complete as in Paris. Nowhere else do you find so many women of wit and genius mingling in the assemblies and festive occasions of literary men; and I may add that in no part of the world is literary society so refined, so brilliant, and charmingly intellectual as in Paris. It is a great contrast to literary society in London or America. Listen to the following confession of Lord Byron: "I have left an assembly filled with all the great names of haut-ton in London, and where little but names were to be found, to seek relief from the ennui that overpowered me, in a cider cellar! and have found there more food for speculation than in the vapid circles of glittering dullness I had left."
One of the most remarkable and the most noted persons to be met with in Paris is Madame Dudevant, commonly known as Georges Sand. She is now about fifty years of age (it is no crime to speak of the age of a woman of her genius), a large, masculine, coarse-featured woman, but with fine eyes, and open, easy, frank, and hearty in her manner to friends. To a discerning mind her writings will convey a correct idea of the woman. You meet her everywhere dressed in men's clothes—a custom which she adopts from no mere caprice or waywardness of character, but for the reason that in this garb she is enabled to go where she pleases without exciting curiosity, and seeing and hearing what is most useful and essential for her in writing her books. She is undoubtedly the most masculine mind of France at the present day. Through the folly of her relations she was early married to a fool, but she soon left him in disgust, and afterwards formed a friendship with Jules Sandeau, a novelist and clever critic. It was he who discovered her genius, and first caused her to write. It was the name of this author, Jules Sandeau, that she altered into Georges Sand—a name which she has made immortal.
Georges Sand in company is silent, and except when the conversation touches a sympathetic chord in her nature, little given to demonstration. Then she will talk earnestly on great matters, generally on philosophy or theology, but in vain will you seek to draw her into conversation on the little matters of ordinary chit-chat. She lives in a small circle of friends, where she can say and do as she pleases. Her son is a poor, weak-brained creature, perpetually annoying the whole neighbourhood by beating on a huge drum night and day. She has a daughter married to Chlessindur, the celebrated sculptor, but who resembles but little her talented mother. Madame Georges Sand has had a life of wild storms, with few rays of sunshine to brighten her pathway; and like most of the reformers of the present day, especially if it is her misfortune to be a woman, is a target to be placed in a conspicuous position, to be shot at by all dark, unenlightened human beings who may have peculiar motives for restraining the progress of mind; but it is as absurd in this glorious nineteenth century to attempt to destroy freedom of thought and the sovereignty of the individual, as it is to stop the falls of Niagara.
There was a gifted and fashionable lady (the Countess of Agoult), herself an accomplished authoress, concerning whom and Georges Sand a curious story is told. They were great friends, and the celebrated pianist Liszt was the admirer of both. Things went on smoothly for some time, all couleur de rose, when one fine day Lizst and Georges Sand disappeared suddenly from Paris, having taken it into their heads to make the tour of Switzerland for the summer together. Great was the indignation of the fair countess at this double desertion; and when they returned to Paris, Madame d'Agoult went to Georges Sand, and immediately challenged the great writer to a duel, the weapons to be finger-nails, etc. Poor Lizst ran out of the room, and locked himself up in a dark closet till the deadly affray was ended, and then made his body over in charge to a friend, to be preserved, as he said, for the remaining assailant. Madame d'Agoult was married to an old man, a book-worm, who cared for nought else but his library; he did not know even the number of children he possessed, and so little the old philosopher cared about the matter that when a stranger came to the house, he invariably, at the appearance of the family, said: "Allow me to present to you my wife's children"; all this with the blandest smile and most contented air.
Romanism
I know not that history has anything more wonderful to show than the part which the Catholic Church has borne in the various civilizations of the world.
What a marvellous structure it is, with its hierarchy ranging through long centuries almost from apostolic days to our own; living side by side with forms of civilisation and uncivilisation, the most diverse and the most contradictory, through all the fifteen hundred years and more of its existence; asserting an effective control over opinions and institutions; with its pontificate (as is claimed) dating from the fisherman of Galilee, and still reigning there in the city that heard Saint Peter preach, and whom it saw martyred; impiously pretending to sit in his chair and to bear his keys; shaken, exiled, broken again and again by schism, by Lutheran revolts and French revolutions; yet always righting itself and reasserting a vitality that neither force nor opinion has yet been able to extinguish. Once with its foot on the neck of kings, and having the fate of empires in its hands, and even yet superintending the grandest ecclesiastical mechanism that man ever saw; ordering fast days and feast days, and regulating with omnipotent fiat the very diet of millions of people; having countless bands of religious soldiery trained, organized, and officered as such a soldiery never was before nor since; and backed by an infallibility that defies reason, an inquisition to bend or break the will, and a confessional to unlock all hearts and master the profoundest secrets of all consciences. Such has been the mighty Church of Rome, and there it is still, cast down, to be sure, from what it once was, but not yet destroyed; perplexed by the variousness and freedom of an intellectual civilisation, which it hates and vainly tries to crush; laboriously trying to adapt itself to the Europe of the nineteenth century, as it once did to the Europe of the twelfth; lengthening its cords and strengthening its stakes, enlarging the place of its tent, and stretching forth the curtains of its habitations, even to this Republic of the New World.
The only wonder is that such a church should be able to push its fortunes so far into the centre of modern civilization, with which it can feel no sympathy, and which it only embraces to destroy. I confess I find it difficult to believe that a total lie could administer comfort and aid to so many millions of souls; and the explanation is, no doubt, that it is all not a total lie; for even its worse doctrines are founded on certain great truths which are accepted by the common heart of humanity.
There is such a thing as universal truth, and there is such a thing as apostolic succession, made not by edicts, bulls, and church canons, but by an interior life divine and true. But all these Rome has perverted, by hardening the diffusive spirit of truth into so much mechanism cast into a mould in which it has been forcibly kept; and by getting progressively falser and falser as the world has got older and wiser, till the universality became only another name for a narrow and intolerant sectism, while the infallibility committed itself to absurdity, and which reason turns giddy, and faith has no resource but to shut her eyes; and the apostolic succession became narrowed down into a mere dynasty of priests and pontiffs. A hierarchy of magicians, saving souls by machinery, opening and shutting the kingdom of heaven by a "sesame" of incantations which it would have been the labour of a lifetime to make so much as intelligible to St. Peter or St. Paul.