You will see if I am mistaken. I will tell
you now what made us intimate friends. For three years, from 1828 to
1831, Beatrix, while enjoying the last fetes of the Restoration,
making the round of the salons, going to court, taking part in the
fancy-balls of the Elysee-Bourbon, was all the while judging men, and
things, events, and life itself, from the height of her own thought.
Her mind was busy. These first years of the bewilderment the world
caused her prevented her heart from waking up. From 1830 to 1831 she
spent the time of the revolutionary disturbance at her husband's
country-place, where she was bored like a saint in paradise. On her
return to Paris she became convinced, perhaps justly, that the
revolution of July, in the minds of some persons purely political,
would prove to be a moral revolution. The social class to which she
belonged, not being able, during its unhoped-for triumph in the
fifteen years of the Restoration to reconstruct itself, was about to
go to pieces, bit by bit, under the battering-ram of the bourgeoisie.
She heard the famous words of Monsieur Laine: 'Kings are departing!'
This conviction, I believe was not without its influence on her
conduct.
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