Here women mingle politics and gallantry--men mix politics and epicurism--which is the better mixture? I have business of importance to my country to transact to-day, _therefore_ I am going to dine with the modern Apicius. Excuse me, my dear friend, if I cannot stay at present to answer your questions about divorce. I must be punctual. What sort of a negotiator can he make who is too late at a minister’s dinner? Five minutes might change the face of Europe. Yours truly, J. B. * * * * * LETTER XVIII. MADAME DE P---- TO OLIVIA. Paris. My incomparable Olivia! your letters are absolutely divine. I am _maussade_, I _vegetate_. I cannot be said to live the days when I do not hear from you. Last Thursday I was disappointed of one of these dear letters, and _Brave-et-tendre_ told me frankly, that I was so little amiable he should not have known me.--As to the rest, pardon me for not writing punctually: I have been really in a chaos of business and pleasure, and I do not know which fatigues most. But I am obliged to attend the ministers every day, for the sake of my friends. A thousand and a thousand thanks for your pictures of your English friends: sketches by a masterly hand must be valuable, whatever the subject. I would rather have the pictures than the realities. Your Helen and your Lady Leonora are too good for me, and I pity you from my soul for being shut up in that old castle. I suppose it is like an old castle in Dauphiny, where I once spent a week, and where I was nearly frightened to death by the flapping of the old tapestry behind my bed, and by the bats which flew in through the broken windows. They say, however, that our _châteaux_ and yours are something different. Of this I have no clear conception. I send you three comforters in your prison--a billet-doux, a new novel, and a pattern of my sandal: a billet-doux from R---- says every thing for itself; but I must say something for the new novel. Zenobie, which I now send you, is the declared rival of Seraphin. Parties have run high on both sides, and applications were made and inuendoes discovered, and wit and sentiment came to close combat; and, as usual, people talked till they did not understand themselves. For a fortnight, wherever one went, the first words to be heard on entering every _salon_ were Seraphine and Zenobie.--Peace or war.--Mlle. Georges and Mlle. Duchesnois were nothing to Seraphine and Zenobie. For Heaven’s sake tell me which you prefer! But I fear they will be no more talked of before I have your answer. To say the truth, I am tired of both heroines, for a fortnight is too long to talk or think of any one thing.