Madame de T. lived far from the Court; “a very mixed society,” as she said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor. A few friends assembled twice a week about her widowed hearth, and these constituted a purely Royalist salon. They sipped tea there, and uttered groans or cries of horror at the century, the charter, the Bonapartists, the prostitution of the blue ribbon, or the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII , according as the wind veered towards elegy or dithyrambs; and they spoke in low tones of the hopes which were presented by Monsieur, afterwards Charles X .
The songs of the fishwomen, in which Napoleon was called “Nicolas,” were received there with transports of joy. Duchesses, the most delicate and charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over couplets like the following, addressed to “the federates”:—
Refoncez dans vos culottes Le bout d’ chemis’ qui vous pend. Qu’on n’ dis’ pas qu’ les patriotes Ont arboré l’ drapeau blanc?
There they amused themselves with puns which were considered terrible, with innocent plays upon words which they supposed to be venomous, with quatrains, with distiches even; thus, upon the Dessolles ministry, a moderate cabinet, of which MM. Decazes and Deserre were members:—
Pour raffermir le trône ébranlé sur sa base, Il faut changer de sol, et de serre et de case.
Or they drew up a list of the chamber of peers, “an abominably Jacobin chamber,” and from this list they combined alliances of names, in such a manner as to form, for example, phrases like the following: “Damas. Sabran. Gouvion-Saint-Cyr.”—All this was done merrily. In that society, they parodied the Revolution. They used I know not what desires to give point to the same wrath in inverse sense. They sang their little Ça ira :—
Ah! ça ira ça ira ça ira! Les Bonapartistes à la lanterne!