Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/610

 16, 1860.] of the scene; the lamp-light is subdued and quiet; the dresses of the ladies and the manners of the men are eminently quiet—all is quiet except the voices of the talkers; these are harsh in the male, shrill in the female occupants of the salon. Towards ten o’clock visitors drop in; and here is a vicomte, or a marquis, or simply Gaston de This, or Roger de That, from either the Jockey or the Baby Club. And these young men are full of what has just happened to one of their own friends, and they tell the following story:

M. de N, having a very fine horse, for which he does not particularly care, sells him one fine day to the administration of the Imperial stables. He sells him at the price he bought him for—200 guineas. A fortnight after the sale, his club-mates greet him laughingly, and say he has known how to “make a good thing for himself out of his nag.” He looks surprised, and he is treated to the information that his horse was paid for by the Emperor four hundred pounds.

“You only doubled, old fellow, which was no bad result!” says one man among the rest, and M. de N is so determined to sift the entire business to the uttermost, that at last, much as he dislikes it, he is driven to ask an audience from the Emperor Louis Napoleon. And from the Emperor he gets the truth, and the truth is, that he, M. de N, sold the horse for 200 guineas, but his Majesty paid 400! and the remainder has gone into the pockets of a very high-placed star-and-cross-bespangled personage. To M. de N’s very natural indignation, his Majesty only replies the following:

“Well, I have an excellent stud-master,—perhaps you have too. Mine cheats me—perhaps yours does too. But what remedy is there?”

Now, in the salon we are in, this whole proceeding is spoken of indignantly, and is it not well that it should be so? In Imperialist circles, alas! if allowed to be spoken of, it would not be condemned, because where would be found those who could venture to “throw the first stone?” Is it not, therefore, well—whatever may be their other little absurdities—that there should be some few social centres where honesty and dishonesty are still called by their names?—where family traditions have for several generations taught that fraud was ungentlemanlike, and where really the very portraits on the walls would blush if they saw the younger ones of their race resorting to practices to which the law—when it takes cognisance of them—uses hard terms?

Here, then, the salon is useful as a corrective.

We will new step into another of these drawing-rooms: but this one shall be situated in another quarter, and shall be somewhat less aristocratical. It shall be less quiet too. Here there is gilding in profusion, and great magnificence, and a large assemblage of men and women are gathered together, among whom you may note all the celebrities of Louis Philippe’s day, and they talk loudly of all that is going on. At last some one says: “But is it true that Madame M has been taken back to her husband by her father-in-law?” and at this question there is a slight lull in the conversation. People look round, and seem cautious; and then a few voices say, in a low tone: “Of course it is true:” and some one adds: “I was at O” (naming a provincial town), “when it happened, and I know all about it.” Then the speaker steps forth, and comes near to the master of the house, and they whisper together, and the story is this:

The son of a great Imperialist dignitary marries a large fortune, represented by a young lady. They go honeymooning to O, where the bridegroom is named (by his own father) to a high financial post. The bridegroom had clamorous creditors, however, who, now he is married richly, will be paid. He charges a friend of his to settle all these unpleasant affairs; but they are not to be settled, and no money is forthcoming. So at last the young husband flies to his young wife, and says: “Lend me 20,000l.” (400,000f.), and the young wife says: “I won’t;” besides which she adds, “I can’t; for papa tied up my money, you know, before marriage, by the “régime dotalrégime dotal [sic].” Then the young lord and master flies into a rage, and ends by horsewhipping his fair spouse, who runs away, and takes refuge with her father in the town of R. Scandal therefore is terrible in two provincial cities, and soon in Paris, and “everybody” who is “anybody” knows the whole story in a week, and this creates fierce anger in high quarters.

Well then, here are our salon-full of people occupied about this anecdote, when a lady, addressing an elderly man of singularly intelligent countenance, but whose whole attitude is one of the bitterest contempt that can be incarnate in a human form, says: “But you, M. V,” (and she names such an illustrious name!) “you must know all about this.” The man thus addressed nods his head: “Of course I do,” he replies, in a whisper; “and so do many others,—but I request you will not quote me!”

And now, why does a man so illustrious as V, a man who was one of his sovereign’s ministers for many years, and to whom all France looks with pride—why does he hang back, and about a mere piece of drawing-room scandal “request” not to be quoted as an authority for what he admits he “well knows?” Why? Why because two nights before, a lesser man, an obscurer citizen, had been seized by order of the Ministry of the Interior, and transported from his home to the prison of Mazes, where it was thought advisable he should reflect upon the danger of talking too freely. Here was his crime: he had “talked!” This citizen was the “friend” who had been charged to “settle” M. M’s affairs with his creditors, and his testimony to the truth of the whole, imprudently given, had brought down upon him the ministerial rigours, and probably several months will now pass by before this helpless victim of despotic rule will be restored to freedom. This is why such a man as V is desirous “not to be quoted;” and this is the kind of “talk” that goes on in Paris salons. In some, there is more indignation than fear; in others more fear than indignation: but in all