get money by any other means than those I have indicated would be considered in the worst possible taste. On the other hand, it is permitted to any member of the club to lose as much money as he pleases without loss of the respect of his fellows, and the surest way to arrive at this result is to undertake the breeding and running of horses. As to the external appearance and bearing of the perfect clubman, it is very much that of Disraeli's hero, "who could hardly be called a dandy or a beau. There was nothing in his dress, though some mysterious arrangement in his costume--some rare simplicity, some curious happiness--always made him distinguished: there was nothing, however, in his dress, which could account for the influence that he exercised over the manners of his contemporaries;" and it is probably a fact that a member of the club is never noticed by passers on the street on account of anything in his dress or appearance. In short, the club seems to have adopted for its motto _Sancta simplicitas_, and the descendants of the old nobility of France, excluded as they practically are to-day from all public employment save that of the army, seem determined to live amongst themselves, in tranquillity and retirement, in such a way as to attract the least possible notice from the press or from the crowd. Their portraits never find their way into the illustrated papers, and no penny-a-liner ventures to make them the subject of a biographical sketch: indeed, any one rash enough to seek to tread upon this forbidden ground would find himself met at the threshold by a dignified but very decided refusal of all information and material necessary to his undertaking. As an illustration of the care taken by the ruling spirits of the club to preserve the attitude which they have assumed toward the public, it may be worth mentioning that Isabelle, who for a long time enjoyed the distinction of serving the club as its accredited flower-girl, and who in that capacity used to hold herself in readiness every evening in her velvet tub at the foot of the staircase of the splendid apartments at the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue Scribe--the present location of the club--was dismissed for no other reason than that she had become too extensively known to the gay world of Paris. Excluded from the sacred paddock on the race-course, she is to-day compelled to content herself on great occasions with selling her flowers on the public turf from a pretty basket-wagon drawn by a pair of coquettish black ponies, or "toy" ponies in the language of the day. Notwithstanding the magnificence of the present quarters of the club to which I have referred, one cannot help regretting that, unlike the Agricultural Society and the Club of the Champs Elyses, it is obliged to confine itself to one story of the building--the first floor, according to continental enumeration--though the rental of this floor alone amounts to some three hundred thousand francs a year.