woman, was visible or seemed to be visible. “It is the thunder-clap,” he said, “you have just felt! You can listen, too. Your sublimes will amalgate, as Saint Simon said of some one. But now turn and look with your glasses in the fourth box of the first tier on the left. You see a woman in white, fanning herself with a fan, with silk muslin flounces, white too, and an invention of her own? That is Madam Pierre de Bonnivet. What do you think of her? It is amusing, is it not, to play the game of love and hazard with these two pretty creatures as partners?” I looked in the direction Jacques indicated, and I soon had my glasses fixed on the fashionable rival of the Bohemian Camille Favier. The fatuous insolence which my comrade affected then appeared to me justified, and more than justified, by the beauty of this elegant female who coquetted with him, as he told me. I knew he was too daring a fellow not to go on quickly from liberty to liberty. If Camille recalled, even with her rouge and patches, the Psyches and Galateas of the most suave of the Pre-raphaelite Brothers, Madam Pierre de Bonnivet, with her arched nose, her wilful chin, the fine line of the cheek, her elegant haughty mouth, had beauty enough to justify the most aristocratic pretensions. How, coming of a poor family—I have found out since that she was a Taraval—she inevitably recalled one of those princesses so dear to Van Dyck, that incomplete master, whom no other has equalled, in the art of portraying breeding, and the indomitable pride and heroic energy concealed beneath the fragility of feminine grace. The habits of wealth for two or three generations produce these mirages.