The Bey, who had been in Paris since a few days before, and was the lion of all the _premieres_, had desired to see the opening of the exhibition. He was “an enlightened prince, a friend of art,” who possessed at the Bardo a gallery of remarkable Turkish paintings and chromo-lithographic reproductions of all the battles of the First Empire. The moment he entered, the sight of the big Arab greyhound had struck him as he passed. It was the _sleughi_ all over, the true _sleughi_, delicate and nervous, of his own country, the companion of all his hunting expeditions. He laughed in his black beard, felt the loins of the animal, stroked its muscles, seemed to want to urge it on still faster, while with nostrils open, teeth showing, all its limbs stretched out and unwearying in their vigorous elasticity, the aristocratic beast, the beast of prey, ardent in love and the chase, intoxicated with their double intoxication, its eyes fixed, was already enjoying a foretaste of its capture with a little end of its tongue which hung and seemed to sharpen the teeth with a ferocious laugh. When you only looked at the hound you said to yourself, “He has got him!” But the sight of the fox reassured you immediately. Beneath the velvet of his lustrous coat, cat-like almost lying along the ground, covering it rapidly without effort, you felt him to be a veritable fairy; and his delicate head with its pointed ears, which as he ran he turned towards the hound, had an expression of ironical security which clearly marked the gift received from the gods. While an Inspector of Fine Arts, who had rushed up in all haste, with his official dress in disorder, and a head bald right down to his back, explained to Mohammed the apologue of “The Dog and the Fox,” related in the descriptive catalogue with these words inscribed beneath, “Now it happened that they met,” and the indication, “The property of the Duc de Mora,” the fat Hemerlingue, perspiring and puffing by his Highness’s side, had great difficulty to convince him that this masterly piece of sculpture was the work of the beautiful young lady whom they had encountered the previous evening riding in the Bois. How could a woman, with her feeble hands, thus mould the hard bronze, and give to it the very appearance of the living body? Of all the marvels of Paris, this was the one which caused the Bey the most astonishment. He inquired consequently from the functionary if there was nothing else to see by the same artist. “Yes, indeed, monseigneur, another masterpiece. If your Highness will deign to step this way I will conduct you to it.”