for a turkey, or when he takes the countess's dogs out for an airing, he is the object of universal curiosity and respect; so are the dogs, for that matter. That is why, in view of a celebrity which cannot fail to spread from the neighborhood over Paris, and from Paris over France, he has become a subscriber to a clipping-bureau, just as the countess has done. He will send me the smartest things that are written about him. This is all that he can do for me, for I must understand that he has no time to attend to my affairs. He will see, later,--"when we shall be in power," he writes me, carelessly. Everything that happens to me is my fault; I have never known how to conduct myself; there has never been any sequence in my ideas; I have wasted the best places, without profit. If I had not been such a hot-head, I, too, perhaps, would be on the best terms with General Mercier, Coppée, Déroulède; and perhaps, although I am only a woman, I should see my name sparkling in the columns of the "Gaulois," which is so encouraging for all sorts of domesticity. Etc., etc. To read this letter almost made me cry, for I felt that Monsieur Jean is quite gone from me, and that I can no longer count on him,--on him or on anybody! He does not tell me a word of my successor. Ah! I see her from here, I see them from here, both of them, in the chamber that I know so well, kissing and caressing each other, and making the round of the public balls and the theatres together, as we used to do so prettily. I see him, in his putty-colored overcoat, returning from the races, after having lost his money, and saying to her, as so many times he has said to me: "Lend me your jewels and your watch, that I may hang them up." Unless his new _role_ of participant in political manifestations and of royalist conspirator has filled him with new ambitions, and he has abandoned the loves of the servants' hall for the loves of the _salon_. He will come back to them.