Page 1039 - les-miserables

had gone very passionately into ecstasies and magnetic vi-
sions, had died bankrupt, during the emigration, leaving, as
his entire fortune, some very curious Memoirs about Mes-
mer and his tub, in ten manuscript volumes, bound in red
morocco and gilded on the edges. Madame de T. had not
published the memoirs, out of pride, and maintained her-
self on a meagre income which had survived no one knew
how.
Madame de T. lived far from the Court; ‘a very mixed so-
ciety,’ as she said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor. A few
friends assembled twice a week about her widowed hearth,
and these constituted a purely Royalist salon. They sipped
tea there, and uttered groans or cries of horror at the cen-
tury, the charter, the Bonapartists, the prostitution of the
blue ribbon, or the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII., according
as the wind veered towards elegy or dithyrambs; and they
spoke in low tones of the hopes which were presented by
Monsieur, afterwards Charles X.
The songs of the fishwomen, in which Napoleon was
called Nicolas, were received there with transports of joy.
Duchesses, the most delicate and charming women in the
world, went into ecstasies over couplets like the following,
addressed to ‘the federates”:—

Refoncez dans vos culottes
Le bout d’ chemis’ qui vous pend.
Qu’on n’ dis’ pas qu’ les patriotes
Ont arbore l’ drapeau blanc?

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