The deaf man made the blind man acquainted with the course of things.
They declared that the time which had elasped since Coblentz had not existed. In the same manner that Louis XVIII.
was by the grace of God, in the five and twentieth year of his reign, the emigrants were, by rights, in the five and twentieth year of their adolescence.
All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly amounted to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with the salons, seemed a papyrus.
There were some young people, but they were rather dead.
The liveries in the antechamber were antiquated. These utterly obsolete personages were served by domestics of the same stamp.
They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and of obstinately resisting the sepulchre.
Nearly the whole dictionary consisted of Conserver, Conservation, Conservateur; to be in good odor,-- that was the point.
There are, in fact, aromatics in the opinions of these venerable groups, and their ideas smelled of it. It was a mummified society.
The masters were embalmed, the servants were stuffed with straw.
A worthy old marquise, an emigree and ruined, who had but a solitary maid, continued to say:
"My people."
What did they do in Madame de T.'s salon?
They were ultra.
To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not have disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day. Let us explain it.
To be ultra is to go beyond.
It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne, and the mitre in the name of the attar; it is to ill-treat the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received by heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry; it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to discover that the Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the King is not sufficiently royal, and that the night has too much light; it is to be discontented with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.
The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase of the Restoration.
Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which begins in 1814 and terminates about 1820, with the advent of M. de Villele, the practical man of the Right.
These six years were an extraordinary moment; at one and the same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and sombre, illuminated as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at the same time, with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still filled the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past.