My only meeting with the _haut noblesse_ of France did not leave me with a very good impression of that society which it is practically impossible to penetrate. I had been asked by a friend of mine, in Colorado, to play gallant to the beautiful singer, Marie Van Zant, to whom he was betrothed. My first act of friendship was to try to protect her from a marquis who had been forcing his attentions. The marquis had bet forty thousand francs that he would make her his mistress, and wrote, asking her to be a party to his game and share the money. Receiving no answer to this proposal, he sent a bouquet to Miss Van Zant’s dressing room in which was a note stating that if she did not accept his offer he would publicly insult her as she left the theater. Then she appealed to me. I had a carriage waiting at the stage door that evening, into which I quickly bundled both singer and her mother and, in order to avoid any further scandal, sent them off alone. But I was mistaken. The marquis must have been before me and bribed the coachman to go to a different address. Before they knew it they had stopped before a brilliantly lighted restaurant and the young man was running down the steps to meet them. Marie succeeded in avoiding him by threatening the coachman with arrest if he did not take them home. But some woman got hold of the story, and there was a scandalous article in one of the papers in America. Twelve days after it appeared my friend was in Paris and, coming to my rooms, asked me to meet him at a certain hour as he was going to shoot a Frenchman. He asked me to be one of his seconds and I carried his challenge to the marquis. The nobleman was a mere boy and pleaded that he was too nearsighted to use pistols, and, as my friend did not know the use of swords, the duel came to nothing. I did not know enough to ask for a Jury of Honor or he would have been forced to go on the field. One very characteristically French thing came out of the affair, however, when the marquis tried to pooh-pooh my overtures for a fight on the basis that no “actress” could be insulted in his country and that it was only because we were Americans that he would consider the matter at all.