visitors, we all indulged in
an expression of opinion concerning them, and young Prince Napoleon was
the one upon whom the ladies had made the least flattering impression,
but he only ventured to intimate as much in a low voice.

"I for my part had been more dazzled than gladdened by this visit. One
could not avoid admiring this genius in spite of its inconsiderateness,
and its wanderings, but there was nothing pleasing, nothing graceful and
womanly, in Madame de Stael's manner[36]."

[Footnote 36: Cochelet, Memoires sur la Reine Hortense, vol. i., pp.
429-440.]



CHAPTER VI.

THE OLD AND THE NEW ERA.

The restoration was accomplished. The allies had at last withdrawn from
the kingdom, and Louis XVIII. was now the independent ruler of France.
In him, in the returned members of his family, and in the emigrants who
were pouring into the country from all quarters, was represented the
old era of France, the era of despotic royal power, of brilliant
manners, of intrigues, of aristocratic ideas, of ease and luxury.
Opposed to them stood the France of the new era, the generation formed
by Napoleon and the revolution, the new aristocracy, who possessed no
other ancestors than merit and valorous deeds, an aristocracy that had
nothing to relate of the _oeil de boeuf_ and the _petites maisons_, but
an aristocracy that could tell of the battle-field and of the hospitals
in which their wounds had been healed.

These two parties stood opposed to each other.

Old and young France now carried on an hourly, continuous warfare at the
court of Louis XVIII., with this difference, however, that young