CHAPTER VII.
THE TRANSFORMED CAPITAL.
In all its varied story, the world probably never offered a stranger spectacle than that presented by Paris when Madame de Staël returned to it in 1795. The mixture of classes was only equalled by the confusion of opinions, and these, in their turn, were proclaimed by the oddest contrasts in costumes. Muscadins in grey coats and green cravats, twirled their canes insolently in the faces of wearers of greasy carmagnoles; while the powdered pigtails of reactionaries announced the aristocratic contempt of their wearers for the close-cropped heads of the Jacobins.
To the squalid orgies in the streets, illuminated by stinking oil-lamps, and varied by the rumble of the tumbrils, had succeeded the salons where Josephine Beauharnais displayed her Creole grace, and Notre Dame de Thermidor sought to wield the social sceptre of decapitated princesses. Already royalism had revived, although furtively, and fans on which the name of the coming King could be read but by initiated eyes, were passed from hand to hand in the cafés of "Coblentz." A strange light-hearted nervous gaiety—intoxicating as champagne—had dissipated the lurid
