A study of the lives of philosophers and statesmen will inform and ennoble the mind; but a sideways glance at such a phenomenon as the twentieth-century Risotto cannot help but make it supple. One of the menials of all time, he is one of the successes of ours; and a portent of the doom of aristocracy in England. Born of Machiavelli by Demoiselle Demi-monde, crafty, thin, pale, dry-shiny as shagreen, he had walked to fortune about every great restaurant in Europe, adding always, but with discrimination, to his order of _l’aristocracie internationale_; and to bankruptcy twice, of truly patrician magnificence, about the _baccara_ tables of his less inspired but more cautious colleague, M. Cornuché of Cannes and Deauville. The “creation” of the Loyalty Club must serve his biographers as the pinnacle of Risotto’s career. _L’aristocracie internationale_ was ultimately served at last. Not an American was left on Fifth Avenue, nor an Argentine in the Americas; while Australian fruit-farms deplored the absence of their masters, and Canada adored the _ton_ of her peerless millionaires. We had no sooner entered among the company than Hilary was for going at once: but Risotto having rewarded us with a sofa-table--for he and Hilary had, as the saying is, been boys together when Hilary had been attached to the Embassy in Paris and Risotto was ennobling patrons of the Ritz to _l’aristocracie internationale_--he and I prevailed on Hilary to stay by ordering for him an angel-on-horseback, to which he was notably partial; while I, Risotto said, would have a haddock with a nice egg on it.