"_And I called her not a proper person!_" gasped Lady Maréchale, again shrinking back behind the azure curtains; the projectiles she had shot with such vindictive severity, such delighted acrimony, from the murderous mortar of malice, recoiling back upon her head for once, and crushing her to powder. What reception would they have _now_ at the Court? Von Rosenläu would be powerless; the Pullingers themselves would be better off! Pérette's pot of milk was smashed and spilt! "Adieu, veau, vache, cochon, couvée!" * * * * * When the pitcher lies shivered into fragments, and the milk is spilt, you know, poor Pérette's dreams are shivered and spilt with them. "I have not seen you at the palace yet?" asked her Grace of Frangipane. "We do not see you at the Court, mesdames?" asked M. de la Croix-et-Cordons. "How did it happen you were not at the Duchess's ball last night?" asked "those odious Pullingers." And what had my sister to say in reply? My clematis secured _me_ a charming reception--how charming I don't feel called upon to reveal--but Princess Hélène, with that calm dignity which easily replaced, when she chose, her witching _abandon_, turned the tables upon her detractors, and taught them how dangerous it may be to speak ill--of the wrong people. A STUDY À LA LOUIS QUATORZE: PENDANT TO A PORTRAIT BY MIGNARD. She was surpassingly fair, Madame la Marquise. Mignard's portraits of her may fully rival his far-famed Portrait aux Amours. One of them has her painted as Venus Victrix, in the fashion of the day; one of them, as herself, as Léontine Opportune de Vivonne de Rennecourt, Marquise de la Rivière, with her crève-coeurs, and her diamonds, and her gay smile, showing her teeth, white and gleaming as the pearls mingled with her curls à la mode Montespan. Not Louise de la Beaume-le-Blanc, when the elm-boughs of St. Germain first flung their shadow on her golden head, before it bent for the Carmelite veil before the altar in the Rue St. Jacques; not Henriette d'Angleterre, when she listened to the trouvères' romances sung under her balcony at St. Cloud, before her young life was quenched by the hand of Morel and the order of Monsieur; not Athénaïs de Mortemart, when the liveries of lapis lazuli blue dashed through the streets of Paris, and the outriders cleared her path with their whips, before the game was lost, and the iron spikes were fastened inside the Montespan bracelets;--none of them, her contemporaries and acquaintances, eclipsed in loveliness Madame la Marquise. Had she but been fair instead of dark, the brown Bourbon eyes would have fallen on her of a surety; she would have outshone the lapis lazuli liveries with a royal guard of scarlet and gold, and her friend Athénaïs would have hated her as that fair lady hated "la sotte Fontanges" and "Saint Maintenon;" for their sex, in all ages, have remembered the sage's precept, "Love as though you will one day hate," and invariably carry