Madame de la Caume, the daughter of the hostess, who knows more about French politics than many a deputy at Versailles. But whilst we have been looking in at villa-gardens the Promenade has filled up rapidly. A continuous stream of carriages occupies the centre of the road, a throng of gay folks animate with their showiest toilets the oleander walk and the Jardin Publique, where a tolerable band plays for two or three hours thrice a week. The marble stairs of the Casino are crowded with loungers, and the windows and balconies of every villa are filled with well-dressed men and women. Nowhere, perhaps, excepting in Rotten Row or the Bois de Boulogne, can so many celebrated and beautiful women and handsome or famous men be seen parading up and down together as on the Promenade des Anglais of a fine afternoon in the season. Here gathers the _crême de la crême_ of two worlds, the Old and the New, Europe and America. In the winter of 1870 the town was crowded to excess. Never before were there so many notabilities assembled at Nice--never was there so much gossip, so much _cancan_ and small talk. It was amusing to sit in the shade of a palm tree on the promenade and review the _personæ_ of this Vanity Fair. Frederick Charles of Prussia and his princess in a landau, with two Nubians on the box; the crown-princess Victoria of England and her sister of Hesse-Darmstadt, on a trip from Cannes, where they were then visiting; Her Grace of Newcastle; De Villemessant of the _Figaro_, in an invalid's chair, the most accomplished of _causeurs_; Count Montalivet, the former minister of Louis Philippe, and by him, for a few days at the full of the season, a little old gentleman with a squeaky voice, M. Adolphe Thiers. Next comes a group of ladies, the three daughters of the Hispano-Mexican duchess De Fernan-Nuñez; all three looking exactly alike, tall and dark; all three of a height; all three invariably dressed in black, with lofty Tyrolese hats and cocks' feathers; all three unmarried; all three marriageable, and worth Croesus only knows how many millions; all three invariably alone--a fact which made old Madame Colaredo scream out of her window one day, "_Tiens! voilà les trois cent (sans) gardes_!" Then follow Lord Rokeby, the most affable of lordships; Lord Portarlington; General Sir William Williams of Kars; Princess Kantacuzène, the last descendant of the imperial Byzantine house of that name; the ideally lovely Miss Amy Shaw of Boston; the three pretty Miss Warrens of New York; Madame Gavini de Campile, the wife of the prefect, a fine-looking dame gloriously arrayed in showy robes, whom half the society adored and the rest cordially hated; the duke de Mouchy, who married Anna Murat; the duke de Périgord-Talleyrand, who married an American; the duke de la Conquista, who derives his title from the conquest of Peru; the lovely countess Del Borgo; and the famous Italian beauty, Madame Bellotti, a