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Between the fashionable selections made in the Saloons of the Pompadours and Dubarrys, and Napoleon's preference for mere soldiers, there are many gradations, and the margin is wide enough to afford the least intelligent government means of making rational nominations; but, in all ages, human weaknesses will exercise an influence in one way or another, and artifice will often carry off the prize from modest or timid merit, which awaits a call for its services.
The city of Ingres may be thought of by itself; there is plenty of food for reflection here without recalling the prude whose virtue caused more mischief than the vices of all the Montespans and Dubarrys put together.
And now more than one hundred men who have stripped the people to enhance the splendor of palaces, don the royal robes of this godless rake and do homage to bogus DuBarrys! Small wonder that Dr.
Half a million dollars gone up in frippery and flowers, and the bedizened gang didn't get half the fun out of it that a party of country yaps will extract from a candy-pulling or a husking-bee. The Pompadours and DuBarrys didn't know how.
"And from that time to the time of the extinction of the American branch of the Dubarry family, a feud, as fierce and bitter, if not as warlike, as any that ever raged between rival barons of the middle ages, prevailed between the Berners and the Dubarrys.
"The Dubarrys," he began, "were a French Roman Catholic family of distinction. A cadet of that family came over to Virginia among the earliest English settlers of the colony. "As in the case of the more important among his anglican comrades, he obtained a very large tract of land by Royal patent.
Some said that he had cast himself down headlong from some mountain crest, and his bones were bleaching in some inaccessible ravine; while others, again, did not hesitate to say that the devil had flown away with him bodily. "The fate of the last of the Dubarrys is unknown. The estate, unclaimed, is held in abeyance. The house, burned to the ground, has never been restored.
Bradley-Martin's sartorial kings and pseudo-queens, her dukes and DuBarrys, princes and Pompadours, have strutted their brief hour upon the mimic stage, disappearing at daybreak like foul night-birds or an unclean dream have come and gone like the rank eructation of some crapulous Sodom, a malodor from the cloacae of ancient capitals, a breath blown from the festering lips of half-forgotten harlots, a stench from the sepulcher of centuries devoid of shame.
The church, thereafter known as the Haunted Chapel, has crumbled into the ruin that you see. And such, dear Sybil, is the story of the 'Fall of the Dubarrys." Still the wood is dim and lonely, Still the plashing fountains play, But the past with all its beauty, Whither has it fled away? Hark! the mournful echoes say, Fled away!
How much our super-select society resembles the Madame DuBarrys, the Duc d'Aiguillons and Abbe Terrays, who made the court of Louis a byword and a reproach, his reign a crime, himself a hissing and a shaking of the head of the nations!
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