“The Comtess de C. would have been very handsome but for one terrible drawback—she squinted. I cannot abide those ‘cross eyes,’ as the country people call them; but the French gentlemen did not seem to participate in my antipathy, for the countess was regarded as the beauty of the party. Agreeable she certainly was, lively and witty.... She had an agreeable little dog called Amour—a pug, the smallest and ugliest of the species, who regularly after supper used to jump out of a muff, where he had lain _perdu_ all the evening, and make the round of the supper-table, begging cake and biscuits. He and I established a great friendship, and he would even venture, on hearing my voice, to pop his poor little black nose out of his hiding-place before the appointed time. It required several repetitions of _fi donc_ from his mistress to drive him back behind the scenes till she gave him his cue. “No uncommon object of her wit was the mania of a young smooth-faced little abbé, the politician _par eminence_, where all were politicians. M. l’Abbé must have been an exceeding bore to our English ministers, whom by his own showing he pestered weekly with laboured memorials,—plans for a rising in La Vendée, schemes for an invasion, proposals to destroy the French fleet, offers to take Antwerp, and plots for carrying off Buonaparte from the opera-house and lodging him in the Tower of London. Imagine the abduction, and fancy him carried off by the unassisted prowess and dexterity of M. l’Abbé!” [Illustration] CHAPTER XI THE GAY REALITIES OF MOLIÈRE Dr. Mitford had set his heart upon his daughter’s becoming an “accomplished musician,” in spite of her having, as she tells us, “neither ear, nor taste, nor application.” Her first music master in Hans Place failing to bring about any improvement in her playing upon the piano, she was removed from his tuition and placed under that of a German professor, “an impatient, irritable man of genius,” who, in his turn, soon summarily dismissed his pupil! “Things being in this unpromising state,” she writes, “I began to entertain some hope that my musical education would be given up altogether. This time [however] my father threw the blame upon the instrument, and he now resolved that I should become a great performer upon the harp.