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It was the difference between fresh meat and tinned meat the difference between a vintage claret on the day it is uncorked and the day after. Do not let it be supposed that by this comparison I am suggesting that the talk of Mme. de Peyronnet and her daughters was naturalistic and so artless. It was nothing of the kind.
When Mme. de Peyronnet saw him, the Terrorist had been entirely replaced by the "civilised Statesman." What passed before her eyes was a very old, white-haired man, with a regard deep and impenetrable. She added, however, "I remember noting that everyone seemed to treat him with the greatest awe." By that time, strange to say, he was one of the richest and most respected men in France.
Nassau-Senior's Parisian friends was the brilliant and distinguished Mme. de Peyronnet, an Englishwoman by birth, married to a man of distinguished French family, who occupied an official post in the post-Restoration Administration.
Fouquier-Tinville's private room, like that of the public prosecutor now, was so placed that he could see the procession of carts containing the persons whom the Revolutionary tribunal had sentenced to death. Thus this man, who had become a sword, could give a last glance at each batch. After 1825, when Monsieur de Peyronnet was Minister, a great change was made in the Palais.
I mean by this that she dealt most with the figures of the great world, but by no means in a grandiloquent, consequential, or Beaconsfieldian sense. She had travelled a great deal and seen an enormous number of people in every country of Europe as well as in England, and, therefore, she was and is more cosmopolitan in her talk than were her sisters. Mlle. de Peyronnet was the most epigrammatic.
But the upper classes deserted him in heart and mind, just as they had already deserted him on the great question of the law of primogeniture, the lasting honor of the only bold statesman the Restoration has produced, namely, the Comte de Peyronnet.
The excitement against Polignac and Peyronnet increases, and the Ministers run the hazard of their places by attempting to save them. I fear that is hopeless. The Spanish Radicals seem to find it would be dangerous to pass the frontier. October 20. Office. Cabinet room.
Nothing was more fascinating than to hear Mme. de Peyronnet talk of the street-fighting in '48 and of how life went on, I had almost said, as usual, in the intervals of the fusillades.
I have summarised the characteristics of each of the sisters' talk. Of Mme. de Peyronnet, who in many ways was more brilliant than her daughters, I will say only that she combined their several qualities. When I add that her talk, like that of her daughters, was original, it must not be supposed that she had not a proper appreciation of great events or of great people.
Even here she kept not only her good-temper, but also her brilliant imagination and, above all, her verbal felicity. The scene passes in a Dental Atelier in Paris. Mlle. de Peyronnet must be imagined seated in the fateful chair, dreading the pain but hoping for the relief of an extraction. But, as Tacitus said, that morning she saw all things cross and terrible.
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