more serious and prescient souls than his—filled him with delight. He was brighter and more contented now than he had been in youth; the world seemed a better place to him, and he almost wondered how anybody could be sad in a universe so full of new ideas and dazzling intellectual possibilities.
Besides all these interesting figures, other and more splendid, if not more illustrious, personages crowded Madame de Staël's salon. Thither came the Czar, so chivalrous and sympathetic in these days; thither came her old friend the Duke of Saxe Weimar; and Wellington presented himself to be received with the utmost cordiality, and to inscribe himself on the long list of Madame Récamier's admirers.
At first Madame de Staël's heart beat high with patriotic hopes. She had become monarchical in her feelings again, and expected great things for France from the liberal disposition of the King. She exerted herself quite in her old way to talk over dissidents and reconcile malcontents; for her one longing was that the new constitution of France might be made on the pattern and informed with the spirit of England. But she was not slow to discover how ill-founded were such aspirations. Egotism stalked through the exhausted land—egotism under various forms and professing various creeds; now wearing the superannuated uniform of the Maison Rouge; now decorated with the medals conferred by Napoleon; now prating of old services before the emigration; now professing a servile repentance for base obedience to Bonaparte. They were but differences in the mask after all; yet over these differences men wrangled, and meanwhile the poison of a deadly indifference crept through the veins of France. Madame de Staël
