with absent friends.  They lecture old Mme. du Deffant, who is too lively and whom they style the “little girl”; the young Duchesse, tender and sensible, is “her grandmamma.”  As for “grandpapa,” M. de Choiseul, “a slight cold keeping him in bed he has fairy stories read to him all day long, a species of reading to which we are all given; we find them as probable as modern history.  Do not imagine that he is unoccupied.  He has had a tapestry frame put up in the drawing room at which he works, I cannot say with the greatest skill, but at least with the greatest assiduity. . . .  Now, our delight is in flying a kite; grandpapa has never seen this sight and he is enraptured with it.”  The pastime, in itself, is nothing; it is resorted to according to opportunity or the taste of the hour, now taken up and now let alone, and the abbé soon writes:  “I do not speak about our races because we race no more, nor of our readings because we do not read, nor of our promenades because we do not go out.  What, then, do we do?  Some play billiards, others dominoes, and others backgammon.  We weave, we ravel and we unravel.  Time pushes us on and we pay him back.”

Other circles present the same spectacle.  Every occupation being an amusement, a caprice or an impulse of fashion brings one into favor.  At present, it is unraveling, every white hand at Paris, and in the chateaux, being busy in undoing trimmings, epaulettes and old stuffs, to pick out the gold and silver threads.  They find in this employment the semblance of economy, an appearance of occupation, in any event something to keep them in countenance.  On a circle of ladies being formed, a big unraveling bag in green taffeta is placed on the table, which belongs to the lady of the house; immediately all the ladies call for their bags and “voilà les laquais en l’air"[54] It is all the rage.  They unravel every day and several hours in the day; some derive from it a hundred louis d’or per annum.  The gentlemen are expected to provide the materials for the work; the Duc de Lauzun, accordingly, gives to Madame de V — a harp of natural size covered with gold thread; an enormous golden fleece, brought as a present from the Comte de Lowenthal, and which cost 2 or 3,000 francs, brings, picked to pieces, 5 or 600 francs.  But they do not look into matters so closely.  Some employment is essential for idle hands, some manual outlet for nervous activity; a humorous petulance breaks out in the middle of the pretended work.  One day, when about going out, Madame de R — observes that the gold fringe on her dress would be capital for unraveling, whereupon, with a dash, she cuts one of the fringes off.  Ten women suddenly surround a man wearing fringes, pull off his coat and put his fringes and laces into their bags, just as if a bold flock of tomtits, fluttering and chattering in the air, should suddenly dart on a jay to pluck out its feathers; thenceforth a man who enters a circle