the illumination that formed the atmosphere in which their celestial upper classes lived and loved, with the immemorial manners and language which contemporary poets, without anachronism, fitted so well to the gods and goddesses of classic Greece. The dainty filigree of delicacies and refinements, the sensuous luxuries, the sumptuous furnitures of body and mind, the silks, satins, velvets, brocades, ormolu, tapestry; the drama, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, dancing (for, in the reign of the Grand Monarque dancing also must be added to the fine arts); and that constant May-day, as it may be called, on a Field of Cloth of Gold, for pleasure and entertainment—all this became, to the commonest Parisian and the general Frenchman, as commonplace and as unsatisfactorily inaccessible, as our own Celestial sphere has become to the average citizen of to-day.
Over in America, it was vast forests before them, fabulous streams, new peoples, with new languages, religions, customs, manners, beauty, living in naked freedom, in skin-covered wigwams, palmetto-thatched huts, with all the range of human thrills of sensation, in all the range of physical adventure. This was heaven enough to stir the Gallic blood still flowing in some hardy veins of France.
Women, however, like not these things, but they love the men who do. And, when the Parisian women followed their hearts, that they did not leave behind in France their ideals nor their realities of brocades, snuff-boxes, high-heeled slippers, euphemisms, minuets, and gavottes; that they refused to eat corn-bread, and demanded slaves in their rough-hewn cabins,—all of this, from the genial backward glance of to-day, adds a
