Her daughter's beauty was certainly marvellous, and when, under the reign of Louis Philippe, American society had in Paris more than one brilliant representative and more than one splendid centre of hospitality, where all that was illustrious in the society of France perpetually flocked, we make no doubt many of our countrymen noticed, whether at theatre or concert or ball, the really queenlike air of Mme. de Girardin, and the exquisitely classic profile, which, enframed, as it were, by the capricious spirals of the lightest, fairest flaxen hair, resembled the outline of some antique statue of a Muse.
Delphine Gay and her mother were more the ornaments of the salon of the Duchesse d'Abrantès, perhaps, than of that of Gérard; and as the former continued open long after the latter was closed by death, not only the young girl, whose verses were so immensely in fashion during the Restoration, was one of the constant guests of Junot's widow, but she continued to be so as the wife of Émile de Girardin, the intelligent and enterprising founder of the newspaper "La Presse."
The salon of the Duchesse d'Abrantès was one of the first of a species which has since then found imitators by scores and hundreds throughout France. It was the salon of a person not in herself sufficiently superior or even celebrated to attract the genuine superiorities of the country without the accessory attractions of luxury, and not sufficiently wealthy to draw around her by her splendid style of receiving, and to disdain the bait held out to those she invited by the presence of great "lions." Gérard gave to his guests, at twelve o'clock at night, a cup of tea and "eternally the same cakes" all the year round; but Gérard was the type of the great honors rendered, as we have observed, to Art under the Empire, and to his house men went as equals, whose daily occupations made them the associates of kings. This was not the case with the Duchesse d'Abrantès. She had notoriety, not fame. Her "Mémoires" had been read all through Europe, but it is to be questioned whether anything beyond curiosity was satisfied by the book, and it certainly brought to its author little or none of that which in France stands in lieu even of fortune, but which is not easy to obtain, namely,--consideration.
The Duchesse d'Abrantès was rather popular than otherwise; she was even beloved by a certain number of persons; but she never was what is termed considérée,--and this gave to her salon a different aspect from that of the others we have spoken of. A dozen names could be mentioned, whose wearers, without any means of "entertaining" their friends, or giving them more than a glass of eau sucrée, were yet surrounded by everything highest and best in the land, simply because they were gens considérables, as the phrase went; but Mme. d'Abrantès, who more or less received all that mixed population known by the name of tout Paris, never was, we repeat, considérée.
The way in which Mme. Ancelot introduces her "friend," the poor Duchesse d'Abrantès, on the scene, is exceedingly amusing and natural; and we have here at once the opportunity of applying the remark we made in commencing these pages, upon Mme. Ancelot's truthfulness. She is the habituée of the house of Mme. d'Abrantès; she professes herself attached to the Duchess; yet she does not scruple to tell everything as it really is, nor, out of any of the usual little weaknesses of friendship, does she omit any one single detail that proves the strange and indeed somewhat "Bohemian" manner of life of her patroness. We, the readers of her book, are obviously obliged to her for her indiscretions; with those who object to them from other motives we have nothing to do.
Here, then, is the fashion in which we are introduced to Mme. la Duchesse d'Abrantès, widow of Marshal Junot, and a born descendant of the Comneni, Emperors of Byzantium.
Mme. Ancelot is sitting quietly by her fireside, one evening in October, (some short time after the establishment of the monarchy of July,) waiting to hear the result of a representation at the Théâtre Français, where a piece of her own is for the first time being performed. All at once, she hears several carriages stop at her door, a number of persons rush up the stairs, and she finds herself in the arms of the Duchesse d'Abrantès, who was resolved, as she says, to be the first to congratulate her on her success. The hour is a late one; supper is served, and conversation is prolonged into the "small hours." All at once Mme. d'Abrantès exclaims, with an explosion of delight,--"Ah! what a charming time is the night! one is so deliciously off for talking! so safe! so secure! safe from bores and from duns!" (on ne craint ni les ennuyeux ni les créanciers.')
Madame Ancelot affirms that this speech made a tremendous effect, and that her guests looked at each other in astonishment. If this really was the case, we can only observe that it speaks well for the Parisians of the epoch at which it occurred; for, assuredly, at the present day, no announcement of the kind would astonish or scandalize any one. People in "good society," nowadays, in France, have got into a habit of living from hand to mouth, and of living by expedients, simply because they have not the strength of mind to live out of society, and because the life of "the world" forces them to expenses utterly beyond what they have any means of providing for. However, we are inclined to believe that some five-and-twenty years ago this was in no degree a general case, and that Mme. d'Abrantès might perfectly well have been the first maitresse de maison to whom it happened.
"Alas!" sighs Mme. Ancelot, commenting upon her excellent friend's strange confidence,--"it was the secret of her whole life that she thus revealed to us in a moment of abandon,--the secret of an existence that tried still to reflect the splendors of the Imperial epoch, and that was at the same time perplexed and tormented by all the thousand small miseries of pecuniary embarrassment. There were the two extremes of a life that to the end excited my surprise. Grandeur! want!--between those two opposites oscillated every day of the last years of the Duchesse d'Abrantès; the exterior and visible portion of that life arranged itself well or ill, as it best could, in the middle,--now apparently colored by splendor, and now degraded by distress; but at bottom the existence was unvaryingly what I state."
Madame d'Abrantès, at the period of her greatest notoriety, occupied the ground-floor of a hotel in the Rue Rochechouart, with a garden, where dancing was often introduced upon the lawn. Some remnants of the glories of Imperialism were collected there, but the principal habitués were men of letters, artists, and young men who danced well! (les jeunes beaux qui dansaient bien!) That one phrase characterizes at once the ex-belle of the Empire, the contemporary of the sentimental Hortense de Beauharnais, and of the more than légère Pauline Borghése.