442 France and Miladi Morgan. 



of all society here, though they no sooner puff or push themselves into good 

 company than they are ejected from it, and are seen there no more : in 

 short, they are a sort of he-Miladi Morgans, low, silly, and self-sufficient, 

 giving their opinions of their own fame, their own talents, and, what is 

 at once most burlesque and disgusting, their influence on the morals and 

 public feelings of the age. Some of them, too, who have gone under the 

 hands of the law for works too scandalous even for the liberal ideas of 

 France, make a merit of their punishment, and talk of their 'perse- 

 cutions.' They are patriots and martyrs for life. 



" Of such miserable creatures Paris, in its lower circles, is full ; for 

 this is the ' march-of-mind age' among us too. Any stranger, who will 

 give them a cup of coffee, will have them all crowding in, and if he 

 keeps a ' visiting book/ (Miladi's eternal boast, in the quintessence of 

 vulgarity), it will never want names enough, three-fourths of which are, 

 undeniably, those of the most contemptible race that ever made literature 

 contemptible. 



" But, as to Lafayette, lernaux, Rothschild, and persons of that class, 

 the charm that makes its way with them is puffery. The man, woman, 

 or child, who promises to make a book, and give them a niche in it, is 

 sure of a reception. Lafayette's whole career has been this miserable 

 craving for popularity. To be talked of by any body, any where, and 

 at any price, is the only principle that this old man ever honoured in 

 the keeping, and he knows it to be the sole secret of his power. Miladi 

 Morgan writes books, puffs herself as an organ of European opinion ; 

 puffs every body who lends her his arm up a staircase, or hands her a cup 

 of coffee, or endures for five minutes her abominable French, her counte- 

 nance, and her other infirmities ; and Lafayette suffers her to push her 

 vulgar way among the mob who flatter the old Jacobin. The others are 

 tradesmen, who look to those receptions as part of their trade. 



" The dames who figure in her visiting book, or in her pages, are in 

 general ladies perfectly unknown to society in Paris; some of them 

 totally obscure, and some better left in obscurity than brought into 

 the light after the long oblivion fittest for their characters. Any 

 Miladi hiring a hackney coach, and running about the hotels in the 

 Fauxbourg, dropping tickets at every fourth and fifth story, may have 

 a " visiting book" full of prodigiously fine titles, to which the Miladies 

 in question have as much right as their husbands, when they had any, 

 might possess to their children. 



" The fact is that Paris consists of circles of all kinds, and that any 

 little, bustling, frisky pretender to literature, fashion or philosophy, 

 can have, at an hour's notice, a crowd of the ragged elite of the male 

 scribblers of this country, and the female charmers of the last ; the 

 poor retainers of the lowest of the muses, the chansonniers, the re- 

 freshers of old dramas, and the patchers of new, are ready for 

 the call, and to meet them are perfectly ready the Mesdames, the 

 wrinkled representatives of the Fillettes, Du Chatelets, Ninons, and 

 all those combiners of science with more earthly raptures, who love 

 gossip still. So much for the select society, which any maker of books 

 on France may make the stock of her scandalous chronicle, the delight 

 of her mornings, and the boast of her evenings, if she will but you 

 shall have a ' morning* of Miladi ; the consummation of she-coxcombry 

 and egotism. 



" ' / happened one night to mention, at General Lafayette's, that I 



