At a time when she was the mistress of a young Counsellor of State, who had gallantly placed in her hands the key of his ancestral coffers, Mademoiselle Musette was in the habit of receiving once a week in her pretty drawing room in the Rue de la Bruyere. These evenings resembled most Parisian evenings, with the difference that people amused themselves. When there was not enough room they sat on one another's knees, and it often happened that the same glass served for two. Rodolphe, who was a friend of Musette and never anything more than a friend, without either of them knowing why--Rodolphe asked leave to bring his friend, the painter Marcel. "A young fellow of talent," he added, "for whom the future is embroidering his Academician's coat." "Bring him," said Musette. The evening they were to go together to Musette's Rodolphe called on Marcel to fetch him. The artist was at his toilet. "What!" said Rodolphe, "you are going into society in a colored shirt?" "Does that shock custom?" observed Marcel quietly. "Shock custom, it stuns it." "The deuce," said Marcel, looking at his shirt, which displayed a pattern of boars pursued by dogs, on a blue ground. "I have not another here. Oh! Bah! So much the worse, I will put on a collar, and as 'Methuselah' buttons to the neck no one will see the color of my lines." "What!" said Rodolphe uneasy, "you are going to wear 'Methuselah'?" "Alas!" replied Marcel, "I must, God wills it and my tailor too; besides it has a new set of buttons and I have just touched it up with ivory black." "Methuselah" was merely Marcel's dress coat. He called it so because it was the oldest garment of his wardrobe. "Methuselah" was cut in the fashion of four years' before and was, besides of a hideous green, but Marcel declared that it looked black by candlelight. In five minutes Marcel was dressed, he was attired in the most perfect bad taste, the get-up of an art student going into society. M. Casimir Bonjour will never be so surprised the day he learns his election as a member of the Institute as were Rodolphe and Marcel on reaching Mademoiselle Musette's. This is the reason for their astonishment: Mademoiselle Musette who for some time past had fallen out with her lover the Counsellor of State, had been abandoned by him at a very critical juncture. Legal proceedings having been taken by her creditors and her landlord, her furniture had been seized and carried down into the courtyard in order to be taken away and sold on the following day. Despite this incident Mademoiselle Musette had not for a moment the idea of giving her guests the slip and did not put off her party. She had the courtyard arranged as a drawing room, spread a carpet on the pavement, prepared everything as usual, dressed to receive company, and invited all the tenants to her little entertainment, towards which Heaven contributed its illumination.