576 Life of Count Rumford. 



regarded such a house and its usages as something rare or 

 strange. It was conformed to the spirit, the habitual tone, of 

 life in their time, a time of a noble and liberal sociability 

 which was engaged in stirring great questions and great interests, 

 extracting from them only their agreeable elements, the move- 

 ment of thought and hope, leaving to their inheritors the strug- 

 gle of practical trial and experiment." 



M. Guizot then indulges in a long digression, writ- 

 ten in a mingled spirit of regret and hopefulness, as 

 he recalls the generation that passed from the stage at 

 the era of the Revolution, and as he tries to bridge the 

 abyss between that fearful epoch and our own. He calls 

 back the glory of that olden time, the brilliant social 

 circles devoted to the pleasures of the intellect ; the har- 

 monious fellowships of men of various accomplishments 

 and activities, the nobles, the clergy, the lawyers, 

 men of affairs and of letters, and the highly cultivated 

 women, who mingled on equal terms in all the coteries; 

 and then he reproduces the attractions and engage- 

 ments of the saloons of those days, with the selecter 

 groups which composed them. His brilliant, but pen- 

 sive, historical and philosophical review of the revo- 

 lutionary and transition epoch, is preliminary to his 

 fond memorial of the lady whom he describes as 

 educated under the most delightful influences of the 

 society of which she was among the very last sur- 

 vivors. 



Marie Anne Pierrete Paulze was born at Montbri- 

 son, January 20, 1758, and died as Madame de Rum- 

 ford, in Paris, February 10, 1836; having outlived her 

 last husband nearly twenty-two years. She was the 

 daughter of M. Paulze, receiver and farmer general of 

 the revenues, and a niece of the Abbe Terrai, comptrol- 



