First Napoleon. There remained, however, an arrangement to be completed which, though awkward and painful, was yet positively necessary. No one better than Napoleon III. was aware of the truth of the old adage which declares that a man must be off with the old love before he is on with the new. In an hotel on the Rue du Cirque dwelt a lady who had been the partner of his days of exile and ill-fortune, who had impoverished herself in his service, and who had devoted herself to furthering his aims with a persistency worthy of a better cause. This lady, the well-known Mrs. Howard, was now to be got rid of. A frank and open rupture was not in the style or the ideas of her royal and sphinx-like lover. A pretended secret mission to England lured her from Paris. She learned the truth at Boulogne, and hastened back to her home. There she found that her hotel had been visited by the police, and that a cabinet wherein she kept the letters of Louis Napoleon had been broken open and rifled of its contents. Deeply wounded by the treatment she had received, she withdrew, not without dignity, from all attempt at contesting the position with her rival. "I go," she wrote to Napoleon, "a second Josephine, bearing with me your star." To do justice to the emperor, it must be confessed that he treated her in other respects with royal liberality. The title of countess of Beauregard and a fortune of a million of dollars were allotted to her. She withdrew to England, where she afterward married. In 1865 a great longing to behold Paris once more came upon her. Her youth and beauty gone, a worn, disappointed and unhappy woman (for her marriage had turned out most wretchedly), she returned to Paris only to die. Her eldest son succeeded to the title of count de Beauregard, and was made consul at Zanzibar. Since the downfall of the Empire he has lived a sort of Bohemian existence in Paris, where his striking resemblance to Louis Napoleon has won for him the nickname of "the ghost" (_le revenant_).