Bouquets of roses and
lilies were distributed to the ladies."
There was an endless series of fetes, receptions, balls at court,
at the houses of the ministers of the foreign ambassador,
theatrical representations retracing the incidents of the
coronation. The cities of the provinces imitated the example of
Paris. All this movement stimulated business, and France appeared
happy. But to an acute observer it was plain that the pomps of the
coronation and the fetes that followed it pleased the people of
the court more than the bourgeoisie. The Count d'Haussonville
says, apropos of the nobility at that time:--
"I had the feeling--educated as I was at college, and provided
early with a sort of precocious experience, the precious fruit of
public education--that the nobility was a world a little apart. I
instinctively perceived how much the preoccupations of the persons
with whom I was then passing my time were of a nature particular,
special to their class, not opposed--that would be saying too much
certainly--but a little foreign to the great currents that swayed
the opinion of their contemporaries. They had their way of loving
the King and their country which was not very comprehensible, nor
even, perhaps, very acceptable, to the mass of the people and the
bourgeois classes, who were rather inclined to remain cold or even
sullen in the presence of certain manifestations of an ultra-
royalism, the outward signs of which were not always at this time
entirely circumspect.
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