ONE:It was time. The day before they left a stone was thrown in at the window just where Mademoiselle dOrlans had been sitting; if it had struck her it might have killed her. It struck her hat which she had hung on the top of a chair. A shower of stones followed, breaking the windows and arousing the Duc de Chartres and their only manservant, who [447] had gone to bed, and who rushed out into the garden, but only in time to hear the hurrying foot-steps of the escaping rascals.Society was much smaller, people knew each other, or at any rate knew much more about each other, than could be the case after the revolution. The Comte dEspinchal was the most extraordinary instance of this essentially social life. He passed his days and nights in going from one party or visit to another; he knew all about everything going [53] on, important or trivial. He appeared to know every one not only at the parties to which he went, but in all the boxes at the Opera, and nearly everybody he met in the streets, so that it was quite inconvenient for him to walk in them, as he was stopped every minute. Not only people at court and in society, but grisettes, employs of the theatres, persons of every class; but though a perfect mine of gossip, he never made mischief.
TWO:His was the leading salon of Paris at that time, and Mme. Tallien was the presiding genius there. Music, dancing, and gambling were again the rage, the women called themselves by mythological names and wore costumes so scanty and transparent that they were scarcely any use either for warmth or decency; marriages, celebrated by a civic functionary, were not considered binding, and were frequently and quickly followed by divorce. Society, if such it could be called, was a wild revel of disorder, licence, debauchery, and corruption; while over all hung, like a cloud, the gloomy figures of Billaud-Varennes, Collot dHerbois, Barre, and their Jacobin followers, ready at any moment to bring back the Terror.
