I received your letter, but can I send you in six weeks a work with which I am satisfied, and with which you yourself shall be pleased? I do not think it is the interest of your paper to press me in this way. So I am rather angry with you, and yet I do not refuse to do what is within human possibility. . A thousand kind compliments, and some reproaches, "GEORGE SAND."

FROM EUGENE SUE.

"I have thought, my dear Veron, that Martin, l'Enfant Trouvé, would be a better title, and it is very important that this rectification be made; you will see why. I shall send you, at the end of this week, about a half volume. Have composed for me a double proof on my paper. Read it and give me your opinion in notes, when you send me my two proofs. I think I am in quite a good vein; however, you will judge, and you will tell me very frankly, as always, what you think, for the commencement is very important, as it is necessary the reader should be enlisted. . I am as happy as ten kings; I have excellent dogs; I work a great deal; and my green-house plants are in full flower. I assure you, ten o'clock at night comes with an incredible rapidity, and at six o'clock, whether it is day or not, I am up. But the great business with me is work; and when I am satisfied with what I have written in the morning, I ride or I hunt with a double pleasure. Isn't this a great life! Adieu, my dear Veron; when the railway is established you must come and see my house. Believe in my very sincere, very affectionate sentiments. Wholly and faithfully yours, E. SUE.*

"What do they say about the title of the Memoires d' un Valet-de-Chambre?" FROM LOUIS NAPOLEON.

Elysée, 14th December, 1851. "My dear Monsieur Veron,-I wish to announce to you, myself, that, wishing to show you all my gratitude for the services you have rendered to the cause of order and of civilization, I have appointed you an officer in the Legion of Honor. Receive this promotion as a proof of my affectionate sentiments.

LOUIS NAPOLEON B."

FROM A. THIERS.

"My dear Monsieur Veron,†-I charged

M. Etienne to compliment you on the talents with which the Constitutionnel is written. Unluckily my letters have flown to the department of the Meuse. I therefore address my compliments directly to you. I add two modifications to them. You praise M. Molé too much, and you use Belgium ill. I know M. Molé has more mind than his colleagues, but he is incapable of supplying their place; he has not talents enough for that; their weakness which crushes them, crushes him too. No one shines by the side of feebler colleagues unless he supplies their place; but M. Molé knows how to do nothing, but to elude; one may elude difficulties for a moment, but never for a long time. M. Molé is weak in consequence of the weakness of his colleagues and also of himself. At the same time I like him well enough, I do not want to see him illtreated, but I don't want to have it thought that we have an understanding with him. If your praises are designed to excite difficulties between him and M. de Montalivet, I am sorry I am not in Paris that I might tell you what praises of that sort are worth; it is lost labor. Junctures of affairs embroil men; but praises given to one and against another is a force given to them, without increasing their variance, which is always great enough when the juncture of affairs leads to it; should we come to an understanding with M. Molé to-morrow, we should wait until day after to-morrow before praising him. As for Belgium, it must not be forgotten that with its disagreeable character it is nevertheless our ally,-that its dignity, its interests are ours,—that our cabinet should not be weakened in a very difficult posture of affairs, and especially that the Belgians should not be encouraged to be feeble, by being maltreated. Such are the homilies of an old parson; I repeat to you the paper is admirable, well written, very courageous; that I applaud it in every respect but two. I should like to send you something, but I should like to know by a letter from you, what is the exact situation, and what are your calculations.-Adieu, je vous fuis mille compliments, A. THIERS."

Doctor Veron made the Revue de Paris not only a brilliant review, but a source of a considerable pecuniary profit to himself, and he found in the relations he there

formed some very efficient aids when he assumed the managership of the Grand Opera, or the Opera, as we believe it is the fashion in Paris to call it, while the guidebooks inform us that its official name is L' Academie Imperiale de Musique.

In 1831, Dr. Veron solicited and obtained the privilege of the Grand Opera. He owed this place, in a great measure, to the footing on which he stood with Count de Montalivet, then the Minister of the Interior, and who was under some obligations to Dr. Veron for the kind reception he had given to the former's lucubrations, while he was the editor of the Revue de Paris. M. Aguado seconded M. Veron in this enterprise with a great deal of zeal: he placed two hundred thousand francs in his hands as a portion of the collateral security the French government always requires from the manager of the Grand Opera; and, in return for this favor, besides paying the legal rate of interest for the use of this money, M. Veron gallantly insisted that M. Aguado should take the best box of the theatre (and which is now, we believe, the Emperor's box) and occupy it during his whole administration. We would remark, for the benefit of those readers who may be surprised at this zeal on the part of M. Aguado, that the purse-holder of a Paris theatre is reported to hold a very enviable position (and to whose mysterious advantages, we hope M. Veron will, in time, initiate us); it is certain that from 1831 to the present day the members of the Aguado family have found it so agreeable a position, they have not ceased to occupy it at some theatre or another. Rumor alleges they are now the purse-holders of the Italian Theatre. M. Veron made a great deal of money at the Grand Opera; and he promises us some very piquant details touching his managership. They cannot well be otherwise: he was thrown into almost hourly communication with Hérold (sometime maître de chant during his administration), Halévy (who succeeded Hérold in his functions, and brought out during his management La Juive), Cherubini (who also brought out there Ali Baba). Meyerbeer (whose Robert le Diable then coined money for the opera), Rossini and Auber, and especially during the three or four months of rehearsals of their operas, during all of which they are incessantly agitated by joy, or by fear, or by despair." And during his management Mme. CintiDamoreau, M. Nourrit, M. Duprez, Mlle. Falcon, Mlle. Taglioni, Mlle. Fanny Ellssler, were in all the beauty and the

force of their talents. M. Veron betrays the secret of his success:

"While I was manager of the opera, I enjoyed the most delicate perfumes of praise; all the newspapers celebrated with warmth my great administrative talents, and my intelligent passion for arts and for letters. The members of the then government, whom I saw a great deal of either at their houses or in my house, often said to me: 'How do you manage to make the newspapers such good friends of yours? they praise you so much, we feel jealous of you.' I was merely cordial and polite to every body; and I paid courteous attentions to every one. I never sent a box to a literary man, without writing him, myself, a note, and reproaching him for not coming to the opera more frequently."

We presume M. Veron will give us further confidences in his art of seducing the press of Paris, "the most fearful wild beast flying," into unanimous and unvaried applause. We have reason to believe M. Veron ascertained that dinners and suppers are as powerful friends as M. Carème urges they are to all difficult enterprises. We believe the tradition of his entertainments is still fresh in Paris; certain it is, distant as we are from the scene of his triumphs, we have heard of them. One day after Mlle. Fanny Ellssler had fulfilled a brilliant engagement, M. Veron gave a grand dinner in her honor; at the dessert a basket full of jewelry was handed around to all of the lady guests. Mlle. Ellssler modestly took a small ring worth perhaps a louis d'or, but a Mlle. Adeline from some of the minor theatres, whose face was her fortune, and who was invited to the dinner to ornament the table, impudently seized a bracelet of some five hundred louis d'or, and which was destined to the celebrated danseuse. She is said to have been shown the door immediately afterwards: Frenchmen do not relish jokes, whose cream is gold out of their pockets. And a supper given by M. Veron has been so famous as to reach even our ears: he assembled around him the most brilliant literary men of Paris, and the most beautiful actresses; after a luxurious supper, card-tables were brought out, and after groups were formed around each of the tables, a valet in livery handed around a silver waiter filled with louis d'ors; some of the vaudeville actresses helped themselves plentifully; the gaming went on briskly; Mlle. Page [an actress of the Variétés Theatre, as remarkable for her beauty as she is notorious for the use she makes of it] won a great deal of money,

and then lost more than she had won; she took the silver waiter and emptied its contents in her lap; which made M. Veron so angy, that he gave her a sharp lecture, and instantly retired to bed.

After M. Veron had made a fortune at the Grand Opera, he became ambitious. He had enjoyed so intimate a social commerce with political men, he felt a longing to be of them as well as with them; and perhaps a tribune surrounded by an applauding audience occupied a large hall in one of his castles in the air. "In 1837, I

set out for La Bretagne; I purchased estates there; I sent to them valuable stallions, I improved the land, I laid out money on them, to improve the condition of the laborers, le tout, pour ne pas être nommé deputé à Brest extra muros." M. Veron was unsuccessful. The passage we have quoted is none the less curious as showing the preliminary steps deemed necessary under the reign of Louis Philippe to reach the Chamber of Deputies. Buncombe is in France as well as in regions with which we are more familiar.

The 12th March. 1838, M. Veron at the suggestion of MM. Thiers and Etienne purchased two shares of the Constitutionnel, for which he paid 262,000 francs. That paper then reckoned 6,200 subscribers; its property was divided into fifteen parts. He was immediately admitted to the editorship of the paper; but, as he was not the principal editor he soon saw himself unable to enforce the measures he deemed necessary; the number of subscribers daily diminished, notwithstanding the public and the avowed patronage of M. Thiers; and it became so involved it was set up at public auction, and sold the 15th March, 1844. We have omitted to mention that M. Aguado purchased from M. Veron the half of one of his shares when the latter purchased the two shares of the Constitutionnel: and that before M. Veron became an editor and proprietor, M. Aguado proposed to him to become the editor of two newspapers he then owned.

M. Veron purchased the Constitutionnel, at auction, for 432,000 francs. A new stock company was formed; a deed made M. Veron absolute master of the political conduct of the newspaper; he abandoned this power to M. Thiers, and contented himself with being the administrator of the paper; indeed, he so completely abandoned all influence touching the politics of the paper, he received the sobriquet of le père aux écus. M. Thiers appointed M. Charles Merruau (now the Secretary General of the Prefecture of the Seine) the chief editor; and he regularly reported the de

bates in the Chambers; he kept in intimate relations with all the deputies of his party; he consulted with M. Thiers every morning, and he admitted or rejected all political articles. Although M. Veron had, after three years of editorship, increased his subscription list to 25,000 subscribers, his losses had amounted to 290,000 francs, and consequently no dividends had been divided among his stockholders, who naturally were dissatisfied, and compelled him to limit his editorial expenses to 110,000 francs; they were in reality 160,000 francs. It may be curious to glance at these details of the domestic economy of a French newspaper. M. Veron announced to his editorial corps that he intended to diminish their salaries. M. Merruau replies by telling him that the party he represented (i. e. M. Thiers) had determined to place 100,000 francs in his, M. Veron's hands, and which would remain his property so long as the Constitutionnel followed the line of policy pursued by the Centre-Left Party, of which, as our readers will remember, M. Thiers was the leader; taking the care, however (and this artful precaution is eminently characteristic of M. Thiers's astuteness), to provide that M. Thiers alone should be the arbiter to decide whether and when the Constitutionnel deviated from the policy of the Centre-Left Party, and consequently to decide when M. Veron should return the 100,000 francs he was allowed to use. From the 12th March, 1838, until the 9th November, 1849, never had any public man so devoted a servant as M. Thiers found in the Constitutionnel. To borrow a low, but expressive phrase, it defended him through thick and thin: the 13th May, 1839, the morning after the émeute of Barbes, the Moniteur announced that the King had framed a new cabinet, the party of M. Thiers had reached power, but he was ostracized; yet the Constitutionnel even then remained faithful to him. Hippolyte Royer Collard had taken the pains, at no inconsiderable expense of time and labor, to assemble all the grammatical faults, and the mistakes of events and of dates in the first volumes of Thiers's History of the Consulate and the Empire; M. Thiers heard of it, and was alarmed; and, at his entreaty, the Constitutionnel engaged M. Royer Collard to suppress his criticisms. But the 9th November, 1849, M. Veron wrote, and published, in the Constitutionnel, notwithstanding the resistance of M. Merruau, a leading article, approving the message addressed by the President of the Republic to the National Assembly

A

the 31st October, 1849. That very day M. Thiers declared he would cease all connection with the Constitutionnel, and he demanded the return of the 100,000 francs. They were returned. We understand the Count de Mornay (who played so active a part in the events of December, 1851), if indeed his name was not a mask of Prince Louis Napoleon himself, then advanced M. Veron 100,000 francs, and the Constitutionnel became the most zealous supporter of the Bonapartist cause. letter we have quoted shows how those services were rewarded. From this time forth M. Veron took an active part in the editorial department of the Constitutionnel; and his editorials were always remarked (our readers are aware the French law on the press requires writers to sign their articles), and they were rudely attacked by the pen and by the pencil; it is the fashion among certain circles in Paris constantly to hold up M. Veron to ridicule. Another newspaper, Le Pays, was founded, and which, after wavering a very long time between the republic of M. Lamartine, and the republic of General Cavaignac, and the republic with Prince Louis Napoleon as the president, as soon as it was very evident the coup d'état of December was completely successful, became a zealous supporter of Prince Louis Napoleon, and one of the loudest petitioners for the re-establishment of the Empire. It injured the subscription list of the Constitutionnel a great deal: in six months it lost 10,000 subscribers; and the Constitutionnel determined to break down the rival paper; to do this it reduced its subscription price from 40 francs to 32 francs a year-a measure which added to its subscription list twenty thousand new subscribers, at a loss not only of all its profits, but of 80,000 francs of its reserved fund. Tired of this unsuccessful and costly warfare, M. Veron proposed to the proprietors of Le Pays to purchase it from them; or to agree to a common rate of subscription. This was declined; but the proprietors of Le Pays proposed to purchase the Constitutionnel for 1,900,000 francs; of this amount M. Veron received 776,000 francs. The sale, and its conditions, was no sooner made public, by rumor, than the Aguado family (the M. Aguado who hitherto figures in the preceding pages died some years before these events; and we are now speaking of his widow and his sons) brought a suit against M. Veron to recover more money than they received, as shareholders, on the ground that M. Veron had received more than his share. The suit was no sooner instituted than the

most odious libels were forged, and were applied to M. Veron: his character was attacked in every way; and none were more ardent and none were more embittered in these attacks than the press of which he had long been a faithful representative, and the literary men to whom he had always been a friend. Besides, M. Veron had never allowed his paper to stoop, and he has never stooped himself to any man; he has always preserved his dignity, and the dignity of his paper, even when in commerce with Prime Ministers, in the days when Prime Ministers were all-powerful in France: he obliged the haughtiest and the most powerful to treat him as their peer; and, under his management, the Constitutionnel was never a slave, potent aid as it might have been to its party.-It would seem to an impartial observer that these reasons alone, were none else wanting, would have, at the least, made writers so cautious as to examine the foundation of the charges made before they reported them.

The

But it is one of the most curious traits of French society, that envy is so prominent in every member of it, both in the capital and in the most secluded village. No country in the world offers such bitterness of feeling between the different classes, nor such obsequiousness of the lower to the higher classes, when they are brought immediately in contact. habits of French life afford ample opportunity to envy, as, apart from the national obtuseness to all those principles of delicacy which with us flow from hospitality, the life on "flats," the custom of resorting to cafés and to restaurants, the frequenting of other public places, or, in a word, the excessive publicity of even the humblest particular life, and the absence of a censorious public opinion-that national conscience which avenges outraged laws, and outraged decorum, in those delicate cases for which the statutes cannot provide punishment, except at the risk of opening the door to graver offences-which encourages to post connections, which elsewhere men conceal in some obscure alley, and even from their nearest friends, advertises to the world one's tastes, and fortune, and character, with an abundance of details which startles our home-keeping, privacyloving notions. Few of our readers, besides those who have resided abroad for a long time, are aware of the gossiping in which the French newspapers indulge, and the ruthlessness with which they lay their hands on the most delicate details of domestic life, and blazon them to their readers. At this moment we have several

files of French newspapers by us, whose contents never cease to astonish us by the familiar details they give of the life of persons moving in Paris society.

It is true M. Veron has some salient points of character, which, in the peculiar constitution of Paris, invite attacks. He is rather eccentric, he is somewhat vain of his luxury, he seems to spread before the public his fortune, and his tastes, and his free habits. Every day while the Rue de Rivoli and Rue de Castiglione are filled with the throng which flows through them between noon and four o'clock, M. Veron in his robe de chambre leans negligently on his balcony, and enjoys the animated scene. In the evening he is always to be seen at a table in the corner of the second salon of the Café de Paris, surrounded by some of the most celebrated writers, or artists, or wits of the day: M. Scribe, the dramatist; M. Jules Janin, and M. Armand Bertin of the Journal des Debats, M. Malitourne of the Constitutionnel, M. Eugene Delacroix, the painter; M. Halévy, and M. Auber, and M. Meyerbeer, the composers; M. Gilbert des Voisins, the witty husband of the famous Taglioni, and some fifty others of the celebrated persons of Paris, alternately, for he gives one of these dinner parties every day, having commonly three guests. After dinner he retires to his box at the Grand Opera, or at the Opera Comique; and is thus in public nearly all the day long. Besides, M. Veron's pug nose, and obesity, and enormous shirt-collar have been made very ridiculous, by one of those statuette caricatures, by M. Dantan, the sculptor (who has amused his leisure with making laughable statuettes of all the celebrated persons of France), who, not content with exaggerating them in a droll manner, encumbers M. Veron's hands with a huge umbrella, a clyster-syringe, and a box of quack cough paste (an allusion to M. Veron's profession, and to a report which ascribes to him the invention, and original proprietorship of the quack remedy). As all of the satirical papers of Paris have adopted M. Dantan's statuette as their model of M. Veron, and as they attack him daily, the publicity in which he lives is increased in intensity, by his never losing his personality (for every body knows him by sight), while their pens and their pencils have exaggerated his harmless eccentricities to ridicule. M. Veron lost the power and the position his place at the head of the Constitutionnel gave him, he found himself greatly abandoned, and especially before the Aguados' suit against him was compromised,

After

and while it seemed to menace him with dishonor, the number of his daily guests and flatterers was considerably diminished. His time hung heavy on his hands. He began to experience the isolation unmarried men experience even in Paris. Thus he was led to write his memoirs. We have now exhibited, as well as we may, the character and the life of the person who presents himself to conduct us through the varying phases of French society, from the end of the Empire down to some time last year. We would fain hope that our reader has not deemed the space too long, which we have given to M. Veron. could not well have been curtailed, and have given the reader the necessary knowledge of the previous history, and the character of the historian :- "The revolutions which this half century has seen," says M. Veron, "are not only the revolutions of governments, and of dynasties, but they have caused the profoundest changes in our ideas, in all of our philosophy, in our literature, in our moeurs, and even in our hygiene." Let us turn to his memoirs.

It

We have nowhere read a sadder picture of the days of the Empire, whose effulgence so dazzles our eyes; we cannot readily conceive the social state of the country whose flag was floating on every public edifice of western continental Europe, whose polished tongue was the official language of every court, whose admirable Code Napoleon protected property, and reputation, and life every where. It would, however, have required no great deal of reflection to have deduced that as, of necessity, the butchers of a hundred fields, living on blood, and familiar with murder, and other scenes of violence which follow war as inevitably as the night the day, could not have been softened to courtiers by the first whiff of the perfumed air of a flower-decked drawing-room. Our utter ignorance of the state of society during the Consulate and the Empire, is partly owing to the complete severance of relations between England and France (on the former we were mainly dependent for all we know about Europe during that period), and partly that the French wrote all the history we have about their nation during that time, and because the gigantic genius of Napoleon completely absorbed all attention, as we have just said. But who is there that does not feel every drop of blood in his veins tingle, when he is told (and by a favorable witness, who, in his blind admiration of the extraordinary man who rescued France from anarchy, seems insensible of the enormities he is narrating),—who is