One day, to free himself from an obligation which he had stupidly assumed by accepting an invitation to the house of a friend who was not a conspicuous personage, but whom he was not yet ready to drop, Charrigaud wrote him the following letter: _My Dear Old Friend:_ We are disconsolate. Excuse us for not keeping our promise for Monday. But we have just received, for that very day, an invitation to dine at the Rothschilds. It is the first. You understand that we cannot refuse. It would be disastrous. Fortunately, I know your heart. Far from being angry with us, I am sure that you will share our joy and our pride. Another day he was telling of the purchase that he had just made of a villa at Deauville: "I really don't know for whom these people took us. They undoubtedly took us for journalists, for Bohemians. But I quickly let them see that I had a notary." Gradually he eliminated all that remained of the friends of his youth,--those friends whose simple presence in his house was a constant and disagreeable reminder of the past, and a confession of that stain, of that social inferiority,--literature and labor. And he contrived also to extinguish the flames that sometimes kindled in his brain, and to finally stifle that cursed wit whose sudden revival on certain occasions it frightened him to feel, supposing it to be dead forever. Then, it was no longer enough for him to be received in the houses of others; he desired, in turn, to receive others in his own house. His occupancy of a residence of some pretension, which he had just bought in Auteuil, was made the pretext for a dinner. I entered their service at the time when the Charrigauds had at last resolved to give this dinner. Not one of those private dinners, gay and without pose, such as they had been in the habit of giving, and which for some years had made their house so charming, but a really elegant, really solemn dinner, a stiff and chilly dinner, a select dinner, to which should be ceremoniously invited, together with some correct celebrities of literature and art, some society personalities, not too difficult to reach, not too regularly established, but sufficiently decorative to shed a little of their brilliancy upon their hosts. "For the difficult thing," said Victor Charrigaud, "is not to dine in the city, but to give a dinner at home." After thinking over the plan for a long time, Victor Charrigaud made this proposition: "Well, I have it. I think that at first we can have only divorced women--with their lovers. We must begin somewhere. There are some who are very suitable, and whom the most Catholic newspapers speak of with admiration. Later, when our connections shall have become more extensive, and at the same time more select,--why, we can let the divorced people slide."