There was a review of Guards on the plain at Sablons that morning, a fête afterwards, at which she would be surrounded by the most brilliant staff of an army of Noblesse, and Richelieu was at that moment the most favored of her troop of lovers. M. le Duc, as every one knows, never sued at court or coulisse in vain, and the love of Thargélie Dumarsais, though perhaps with a stronger touch of romance in it than was often found in the atmosphere of the foyer, was, like the love of her time and her class, as inconstant and vivacious, now settling here, now lighting there, as any butterfly that fluttered among the limes at Trianon. Did not the jest-loving _parterre_ ever salute with gay laughter two lines in a bagatelle-comedy of the hour-- Oui l'Amour papillonne, sans entraves, à son gré; Chargé longtemps de fers, de soie même, il mourrait!-- when spoken by Thargélie Dumarsais--laughter that hailed her as head-priestess of her pleasant creed, in a city and a century where the creed was universal? "Ah, bonjour! You have not seen her before, have you, semi-Englishman? You have found nothing like her in the foggy isles, I wager you fifty louis!" cried one of Thargélie Dumarsais's court, the Marquis de la Thorillière, meeting a friend of his who had arrived in Paris only the day before, M. le Chevalier de Tallemont des Réaux, as Richelieu's cortége rolled away, and the Marquis crossed to his own carriage. "Her? Whom? I have not been in Paris for six years, you know. What can I tell of its idols, as I remember of old that they change every hour?" "True! but, bon Dieu! not to know la Dumarsais! What it must be to have been buried in those benighted Britannic Isles! Did you not see her in Richelieu's carriage?" "No. I saw a carriage driving off with such an escort and such fracas, that I thought it could belong to nobody less than to Madame Lenormand d'Etioles; but I did not observe it any further. Who is this beauty I ought to have seen?" "Thargélie Dumarsais, for whom we are all ruining ourselves with the prettiest grace in the world, and for whom you will do the same when you have been once to the Français; that is, if you have the good fortune to attract her eyes and please her fancy, which you may do, for the fogs have agreed with you, Léon!--I should not wonder if you become the fashion, and set the women raving of you as 'leur zer zevalier!'" "Thanks for the prophecy, but I shall not stay long enough to fulfil it, and steal your myrtle crowns. I leave again to-morrow." "_Leave?_ Sapristi! See what it is to have become half English, and imbibed a taste for spleen and solitude! Have you written another satire, or have you learned such barbarism as to dislike Paris?" "Neither; but I leave for Lorraine to-morrow. It is five years since I saw my old pine-woods."