feminine of all countries, to take the lead in the most highly
educated epoch the world had yet seen. And this was even more
notably the case in 1820. The Faubourg Saint-Germain might very
easily have led and amused the middle classes in days when
people's heads were turned with distinctions, and art and science
were all the rage. But the narrow-minded leaders of a time of
great intellectual progress all of them detested art and science.
They had not even the wit to present religion in attractive
colours, though they needed its support. While Lamartine,
Lamennais, Montalembert, and other writers were putting new life
and elevation into men's ideas of religion, and gilding it with
poetry, these bunglers in the Government chose to make the
harshness of their creed felt all over the country. Never was
nation in a more tractable humour; La France, like a tired woman,
was ready to agree to anything; never was mismanagement so
clumsy; and La France, like a woman, would have forgiven wrongs
more easily than bungling.

If the noblesse meant to reinstate themselves, the better to
found a strong oligarchy, they should have honestly and
diligently searched their Houses for men of the stamp that
Napoleon used; they should have turned themselves inside out to
see if peradventure there was a Constitutionalist Richelieu
lurking in the entrails of the Faubourg; and if that genius was
not forthcoming from among them, they should have set out to find
him, even in the fireless garret where he might happen to be
perishing of cold; they should have assimilated him, as the
English House of Lords continually assimilates aristocrats made
by chance; and finally ordered him to be ruthless, to lop away
the old wood, and cut the tree down to the living shoots. But,