IRENE DE CHATEAUDUN. VIII. EDGAR DE MEILHAN _to the_ PRINCE DE MONBERT, Saint Dominique street, Paris. RICHEPORT, May 31st, 18--. Now that you are a sort of Amadis de Gaul, striking attitudes upon a barren rock, as a sign of your lovelorn condition, you have probably forgotten, my dear Roger, my encounter upon the cars with an ideal grisette, who saved me from the horrors of starvation by generously dividing with me a bag of sugar-plums. But for this unlooked-for aid, I should have been reduced, like a famous handful of shipwrecked mariners, to feed upon my watch-chain and vest-buttons. To a man so absorbed in his grief, as you are, the news of the death from starvation of a friend upon the desert island of a railway station, would make very little impression; but I not being in love with any Irene de Chateaudun, have preserved a pleasant recollection of this touching scene, translated from the Æneid in modern and familiar prose. I wrote immediately,--for my beauty, of an infinitely less exalted rank than yours, lodges with the post-mistress,--several fabulous letters to problematic people, in countries which do not exist, and are only designated upon the map by a dash. Madame Taverneau has conceived a profound respect for a young man who has correspondents in unknown lands, barely sighted in 1821 at the Antarctic pole, and in 1819 at the Arctic pole, so she invited me to a little soirée musicale et dansante, of which I was to be the bright particular star. An invitation to an exclusive ball, given at an inaccessible house, never gave a woman with a doubtful past or an uncertain position, half the pleasure that I felt from the entangled sentences of Madame Taverneau in which she did not dare to hope, but would be happy if--. Apart from the happiness of seeing Madame Louise Guérin (my charmer's name), I looked forward to an entirely new recreation, that of studying the manners of the middle class in their intimate relations with each other. I have lived with the aristocracy and with the canaille; in the highest and lowest conditions of life are found entire absence of pretension; in the highest, because their position is assured; in the lowest, because it is simply impossible to alter it. None but poets are really unhappy because they cannot climb to the stars. A half-way position is the most false. I thought I would go early to have some talk with Louise, but the circle was already completed when I arrived; everybody had come first. The guests were assembled in a large, gloomy room, gloriously called a drawing-room, where the servant never enters without first taking off her shoes at the door, like a Turk in a mosque, and which is only opened on the most solemn occasions. As it is doubtful whether you have ever set foot in a like establishment, I will give you, in imitation of the most profound of our novel-writers (which one? you will say; they are all profound now-a-days), a detailed description of Madame Taverneau's salon.