general tendencies were Orleanist, while in literature he was well known
as a constant contributor to the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. He and his wife
maintained an interesting, and in its way influential, _salon_, which
provided a meeting ground for the best English and French society, and
showed off at once the delicate quality of Madame de Châteauvieux's
intelligence and the force and kindliness of her womanly tact.

Shortly after her marriage the father and mother died, within eighteen
months of each other, and Eustace found his lot in life radically
changed. He had been his father's secretary after leaving college, which
prevented his making any serious efforts to succeed at the bar, and in
consequence his interest, both of head and heart, had been more
concentrated than is often the case with a young man within the walls of
his home. He had admired his father sincerely, and the worth of his
mother's loquacious and sometimes meddlesome tenderness he never realised
fully till he had lost it. When he was finally alone, it became necessary
for him to choose a line in life. His sister and he divided his father's
money between them, and Eustace found himself with a fortune such as in
the eyes of most of his friends constituted a leading of Providence
towards two things--marriage and a seat in Parliament. However,
fortunately, his sister, the only person to whom he applied for advice,
was in no hurry to press a decision in either case upon him. She saw that
without the stimulus of the father's presence, Eustace's interest in
politics was less real than his interest in letters, nor did the times
seem to her propitious to that philosophic conservatism which might be
said to represent the family type of mind. So she stirred him up to
return to some of the projects of his college days when he and she were
first bitten with a passion for that great, that fascinating French
literature which absorbs, generation after generation, the interests of
two-thirds of those who are sensitive to the things of letters. She