Baron de T., who, during his lifetime, had gone very passionately into ecstasies and magnetic visions, had died bankrupt, during the emigration, leaving, as his entire fortune, some very curious Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub, in ten manuscript volumes, bound in red morocco and gilded on the edges. Madame de T. had not published the memoirs, out of pride, and maintained herself on a meagre income which had survived no one knew how.
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[20]
Le bout d'' chemis'' qui vous pend.