a congenial atmosphere. And music and letters, and all that can refine
and embellish civilized life, contributed their resources to this gifted
and beautiful woman. And thus she found that the _mind_ has excitement
and occupation, as well as the heart; and, unlike the latter, the culture
we bestow upon the first ever yields us its return. We talk of education
for the poor, but we forget how much it is needed by the rich. Valerie
was a living instance of the advantages to women of knowledge and
intellectual resources. By them she had purified her fancy, by them she
had conquered discontent, by them she had grown reconciled to life and to
her lot! When the heavy heart weighed down the one scale, it was the
mind that restored the balance.

The spells of Madame de Ventadour drew Maltravers into this charmed
circle of all that was highest, purest, and most gifted in the society of
Paris. There he did not meet, as were met in the times of the old
_regime_, sparkling abbes intent upon intrigues; or amorous old dowagers,
eloquent on Rousseau; or powdered courtiers, uttering epigrams against
kings and religions,--straws that foretold the whirlwind. Paul Courier
was right! Frenchmen are Frenchmen still; they are full of fine phrases,
and their thoughts smell of the theatre; they mistake foil for diamonds,
the Grotesque for the Natural, the Exaggerated for the Sublime: but still
I say, Paul Courier was right,--there is more honesty now in a single
_salon_ in Paris than there was in all France in the days of Voltaire.
Vast interests and solemn causes are no longer tossed about like
shuttlecocks on the battledores of empty tongues. In the
_bouleversement_ of Revolutions the French have fallen on their feet!

Meeting men of all parties and all classes, Maltravers was struck with
the heightened tone of public morals, the earnest sincerity of feeling
which generally pervaded all, as compared with his first recollections of