The Thuillier salon was in some sort a provincial salon, lighted, however, by continual flashes from the Parisian conflagration; its mediocrity and its platitudes followed the current of the times.  The popular saying and thing (for in Paris the thing and its saying are like the horse and its rider) ricochetted, so to speak, to this company.  Monsieur Minard was always impatiently expected, for he was certain to know the truth of important circumstances.  The women of the Thuillier salon held by the Jesuits; the men defended the University; and, as a general thing, the women listened.  A man of intelligence (could he have borne the dulness of these evenings) would have laughed, as he would at a comedy of Moliere, on hearing, amid endless discussion, such remarks as the following:—­

“How could the Revolution of 1789 have been avoided?  The loans of Louis XIV. prepared the way for it.  Louis XV., an egotist, a man of narrow mind (didn’t he say, ’If I were lieutenant of police I would suppress cabriolets’?), that dissolute king—­you remember his Parc aux Cerfs?—­did much to open the abyss of revolution.  Monsieur de Necker, an evil-minded Genovese, set the thing a-going.  Foreigners have always tried to injure France.  The maximum did great harm to the Revolution.  Legally Louis XVI. should never have been condemned; a jury would have acquitted him.  Why did Charles X. fall?  Napoleon was a great man, and the facts that prove his genius are anecdotal:  he took five pinches of snuff a minute out of a pocket lined with leather made in his waistcoat.  He looked into all his tradesmen’s accounts; he went to Saint-Denis to judge for himself the prices of things.  Talma was his friend; Talma taught him his gestures; nevertheless, he always refused to give Talma the Legion of honor!  The emperor mounted guard for a sentinel who went to sleep, to save him from being shot.  Those were the things that made his soldiers adore him.  Louis XVIII., who certainly had some sense, was very unjust in calling him Monsieur de Buonaparte.  The defect of the present government is in letting itself be led instead of leading.  It holds itself too low.  It is afraid of men of energy.  It ought to have torn up all the treaties of 1815 and demanded the Rhine.  They keep the same men too long in the ministry”; etc., etc.

“Come, you’ve exerted your minds long enough,” said Mademoiselle Thuillier, interrupting one of these luminous talks; “the altar is dressed; begin your little game.”

If these anterior facts and all these generalities were not placed here as the frame of the present Scene, to give an idea of the spirit of this society, the following drama would certainly have suffered greatly.  Moreover, this sketch is historically faithful; it shows a social stratum of importance in any portrayal of manners and morals, especially when we reflect that the political system of the Younger branch rests almost wholly upon it.