“As it was difficult to accept the idea that the grandson of my father, whom we just had seen pass by on the promenade, everybody, young and old, raising their hats to him from afar, would soon be seen at the bar of a lower tribunal, there to contest minor legal matters with pettifoggers; but I said to myself, however, that Louis XIV would be still more astonished had he seen the wife of his grand-successor dressed in a peasant’s frock and apron, with no attendants, not a page or any one else, running about the palace and the terraces, requesting the first scamp in a frock-coat she encountered to give her his hand, which he simply does, all the way down to the foot of the steps.”

But the leveling of manners and appearances of life reflected, indeed, only an equalization of minds and tempers.  The antique scenery being torn away indicates the disappearance of the sentiments to which it belonged.  It indicated gravity, dignity, custom of self-control and of exposed, in authority and command.  It was the rigid and sumptuous parade of a social corps of staff-officers.  At this time the parade is discontinued because the corps has been dissolved.  If the nobles dress like the bourgeoisie it is owing to their having become bourgeois, that is to say, idlers retired from business, with nothing to do but to talk and amuse themselves. —­ Undoubtedly they amuse themselves and converse like people of refinement; but it is not very difficult to equal them in this respect.  Now that the Third-Estate has acquired its wealth a good many commoners have become people of society.  The successors of Samuel Bernard are no longer so many Turcarets, but Paris-Duverneys, Saint-Jameses, Labordes, refined men, people of culture and of feeling, possessing tact, literary and philosophical attainments, benevolent, giving parties and knowing how to entertain[17].  With them, slightly different, we find the same company as with a grand lord, the same ideas and the same tone.  Their sons, messieurs de Villemer, de Francueil, d’Epinay, throw money out of the window with as much elegance as the young dukes with whom they sup.  A parvenu with money and intellect soon learns the ropes, and his son, if not himself, is initiated:  a few years’ exercises in an academy, a dancing-master, and one of the four thousand public offices which confer nobility, supply him with the deficient appearances.  Now, in these times, as soon as one knows how to conform to the laws of good-breeding, how to bow and how to converse, one possesses a patent for admission everywhere.  An Englishman[18] remarks that one of the first expressions employed in praise of a man is, “he has a very graceful address.”  The Maréchale de Luxembourg, so high-spirited, always selects Laharpe as her cavalier, because “he offers his arm so well.” —­ The commoner not only enters the drawing-room, if he is fitted for it, but he stands foremost in it if he has any talent.  The first place in conversation, and even in public consideration, is