of administration, in all shareholders’ meetings, on the Bourse, the boulevards, and everywhere: “The Nabob is in the affair.” That is to say, gold is being poured out abundantly, the worst _combinazioni_ are excellent. He is so rich, that man! Rich to a degree one cannot imagine. Has he not just lent fifteen million francs as a simple loan passing from hand to hand, to the Bey of Tunis? I repeat, fifteen millions. It was a trick he played on the Hemerlingues, who wished to embroil him with that monarch and cut the grass under his feet in those fine regions of the Orient where it grows golden, high, and thick. It was an old Turk whom I know, Colonel Brahim, one of our directors at the Territorial, who arranged the affair. Naturally, the Bey, who happened to be, it appears, short of pocket-money, was very much touched by the alacrity of the Nabob to oblige him, and he has just sent him through Brahim a letter of thanks in which he announces that upon the occasion of his next visit to Vichy, he will stay a couple of days with him at that fine Chateau de Saint-Romans, which the former Bey, the brother of this one, honoured with a visit once before. You may fancy, what an honour! To receive a reigning prince as a guest! The Hemerlingues are in a rage. They who had manoeuvred so carefully--the son at Tunis, the father in Paris--to get the Nabob into disfavour. And then it is true that fifteen millions is a big sum. And do not say, “Passajon is telling us some fine tales.” The person who acquainted me with the story has held in his hands the paper sent by the Bey in an envelope of green silk stamped with the royal seal. If he did not read it, it was because this paper was written in Arabic, otherwise he would have made himself familiar with its contents as in the case of all the rest of the Nabob’s correspondence. This person is his _valet de chambre_, M. Noel, to whom I had the honour of being introduced last Friday at a small evening-party of persons in service which he gave to all his friends. I record an account of this function in my memoirs as one of the most curious things which I have seen in the course of my four years of sojourn in Paris. I had thought at first when M. Francis, Monpavon’s _valet de chambre_, spoke to me of the thing, that it was a question of one of those little clandestine junketings such as are held sometimes in the garrets of our boulevards with the fragments of food brought up by Mlle. Seraphine and the other cooks in the building, at which you drink stolen wine, and gorge yourself, sitting on trunks, trembling with fear, by the light of a couple of candles which are extinguished at the least noise in the corridors. These secret practices are repugnant to my character. But when I received, as for the regular servants’ ball, an invitation written in a very beautiful hand upon pink paper: “M. Noel rekwests M---- to be present at his evenin-party on the 25th instent. Super will be provided”