They all feel that there is something peculiar in what
they witness, but never seem to suspect that nothing like it was ever
seen before in the world. One is tempted to wish that they could have
seen with our eyes, or, much more, that we could have had the
privilege of enjoying their experience, of spending a few months in
that singular epoch when "society," properly so called, the assembling
of men and women in drawing-rooms for the purpose of conversation, was
the most serious as well as the most delightful business of life. Talk
and discussion in the senate, the market-place, and the schools are
cheap; even barbarians are not wholly without them. But their
refinement and concentration in the _salon_--of which the president is
a woman of tact and culture--this is a phenomenon which never appeared
but in Paris in the eighteenth century. And yet scholars, men of the
world, men of business passed through this wonderland with eyes
blindfolded. They are free to enter, they go, they come, without a
sign that they have realised the marvellous scene that they were
permitted to traverse. One does not wonder that they did not perceive
that in those graceful drawing-rooms, filled with stately company of
elaborate manners, ideas and sentiments were discussed and evolved
which would soon be more explosive than gunpowder.
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