daring criticisms of society in general and the government in particular which the philosophical Figaro was expected to utter from the boards.
A scandalous adventure of Monsieur de Fionsac's had shocked, and two abominable adventures of the Marquis de Sade's had appalled, the world.
Society was on the road to the abyss,—no, not to the abyss, to the sewer rather.
Shameful, odious, atrocious these anecdotes one and all; yet they are the only ones to divert the King. Monsieur de Sartines combines them into a daily bulletin,—another ingenious idea of Madame du Barry's,—which his Majesty reads in bed of a morning. It is written and edited in the brothels of Paris, especially in the establishment of the notorious Madame Gourdan.
One day the King reads in the said journal how Monseigneur de Lorry, Bishop of Tarbes, had had the effrontery to drive into Paris in an open carriage with Madame Gourdan and two of her protegees sitting beside him. This was too much; the King informs the Grand Almoner, who summons the Bishop to an interview.
Happily the whole thing admits of an explanation favourable at once to the modesty and the benevolence of the Prelate. Returning from Versailles, the Bishop of Tarbes had seen three women on foot in the highway beside a disabled coach; pitying their predicament, he had offered them seats in his carriage. La Gourdan had seen the diverting side of the situation and had accepted the proposition.
Of course nobody would credit such simplicity on the part of the worthy Prelate, and he was overwhelmed with questions and remarks. "What! you don't know La Gourdan? You mean to tell me that? Nonsense, impossible! "
In the midst of all this the famous musical war between the Glückists and the Piccinists broke out, and the Court is divided into two hostile camps.
Ihe Dauphine, young, poetical, musically gifted, a pupil of Glück's, could see nothing in the native French operas but a collection of trivial airs more or less pretty and insignificant. Attending representations of Racine's tragedies, she conceived the idea of sending the text of the Iphigénie en Aulide to her master, and inviting him to clothe the verses of Racine in the equally melodious harmonies of his music. In six months the score was complete, and Glück brought it in person to Paris.
The German maestro instantly rose high in the Dauphine's favour, and was granted the entree to her private apartments at any hour.
Nothing can be properly appreciated without some preliminary training,—and least of all the grand style. Glück's music by no means produced all the effect it should have done just at first. Empty hearts and tired brains have no wish to think, noise is all they want; thought is an effort, noise a distraction. Accordingly the old-fashioned section of Society preferred Italian music,—the tinkling cymbal to the pealing organ.
Madame du Barry, in a spirit of contradiction, just because the Dauphine had brought German music into prominence, took sides for Italian, and sent librettos to Piccini. The latter duly returned the scores, and the new and the old society separated into two rival factions.
The truth is, an entirely new order of ideas was coming to the front and changing the face of old-fashioned French society, like the unfamiliar wild flowers that spring between the cracked pavingstones of a dark courtyard or among the crumbling ruins of an old castle.
These new ideas came from England, and included many novelties unthought of before. There were gardens with intricate winding walks, and interspersed with lawns and clumps of trees and beds of flowers and stretches of turf; there were rustic cottages, and morning walks without powder or rouge, wearing a plain straw hat with a broad brim and a simple blue cornflower or a daisy stuck in it; there were gallops on well-bred horses, followed by grooms wearing black caps and short jackets and buckskins; there were four-wheeled phaetons, for a time prodigiously popular; Princesses dressed like shepherdesses, and actresses like Queens. There were women such as Duthé, Guimard, Sophie Arnould, Prairie, Cleophile, blazing with diamonds, while the Dauphine, the Princesse de Lamballe, Mesdames de Polignac, de Langeac and d'Adhémar asked no finer jewels than a parure of flowers.
At sight of all these new-fangled notions of a society marching recklessly towards
