It is the fashion this year for ladies to wear lockets on a black-velvet ribbon around their necks. The more lockets you can collect and wear, the finer you are. Each locket represents an event, such as a birthday, a bet, an anniversary of any kind, and so forth. Any excuse is good for the sending of a locket. The Empress had seventeen beautiful ones to-day (I counted them). They have a rather cannibalish look, I think. Is it not in Hayti (or in which country is it?) that the black citizens wear their rivals' teeth as trophies on their black necks? Who should offer me his arm for dinner to night but Prosper Mérimée, the lion of lions, the pampered poet, who entrances all those who listen to him whenever he opens his lips. He looks more like an Englishman than a Frenchman; he is quite old, and I fancy older than he looks (he may be fifty). He is tall and _dégagé_, with a nice smile and pleasant eyes, though sometimes he gives you a sharp and suspicious glance. He speaks English very well. I told him (stretching a point) that I had never heard a foreigner speak such good English as he did. He replied, without a blush: "I ought to speak it well. I learned it when I was a child." And he added, complacently, "I can even write better than I speak." I asked him if he could write poetry in English. He answered: "I do not think I could. My English goes just so far and no farther. I have what is strictly necessary, but not what is superfluous." ("J'ai, le stricte nécessaire, mais pas le superflu.") "To make rhymes," said I, "I should think one would have to know every word in the dictionary." "Oh!" he said, "I don't attempt rhymes; they are far beyond me." When he talks French he is perfectly delightful. He creates the funniest words, and gives such an original turn to his phrases that you are--at least I was--on the _qui vive_ not to lose anything he said. It is like listening to a person who, improvising on the piano, makes unexpected and subtle modulations which you hate to have escape you. He told me he had been in correspondence with an English lady for over thirty years. "Were you in love with her, that you wrote to her all those years?" I inquired. "I was in love with her letters," he replied. "They were the cleverest things I ever read--full of wit and humor." "Was she in love with you or only with your letters?" I was tactless enough to ask. "How can you ask?" he said. I wondered myself how I could have asked so indiscreet a question. "Did she write in English, and did you write in French?" "Yes, she wrote in English," he answered, and looked bored. "Is she dead?" I asked, getting bolder and bolder; but he would not talk any more about this clever lady, and we drifted into other channels of conversation. Too bad! I would have liked to have known if the lady was still living.