had even borne several privations to keep a saddle-horse,
a cab-horse, and a little groom for his use. For herself, she had only
her own maid, and as cook, a former kitchen-maid. The duke's groom
had, therefore, rather a hard place. Toby, formerly tiger to the "late"
Beaudenord (such was the jesting term applied by the gay world to that
ruined gentleman),--Toby, who at twenty-five years of age was still
considered only fourteen, was expected to groom the horses, clean the
cabriolet, or the tilbury, and the harnesses, accompany his master, take
care of the apartments, and be in the princess's antechamber to announce
a visitor, if, by chance, she happened to receive one.

When one thinks of what the beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse had been
under the Restoration,--one of the queens of Paris, a dazzling queen,
whose luxurious existence equalled that of the richest women of fashion
in London,--there was something touching in the sight of her in that
humble little abode in the rue de Miromesnil, a few steps away from her
splendid mansion, which no amount of fortune had enabled her to keep,
and which the hammer of speculators has since demolished. The woman who
thought she was scarcely well served by thirty servants, who possessed
the most beautiful reception-rooms in all Paris, and the loveliest
little private apartments, and who made them the scene of such
delightful fetes, now lived in a small apartment of five rooms,--an
antechamber, dining-room, salon, one bed-chamber, and a dressing-room,
with two women-servants only.

"Ah! she is devoted to her son," said that clever creature, Madame
d'Espard, "and devoted without ostentation; she is happy. Who would
ever have believed so frivolous a woman was capable of such persistent
resolution! Our good archbishop has, consequently, greatly encouraged
her; he is most kind to her, and has just induced the old Comtesse de
Cinq-Cygne to pay her a visit."

Let us admit a truth! One must be a queen to know how to abdicate, and
to descend with dignity from a lofty position which is never wholly
lost. Those only who have an inner consciousness of being nothing in
themselves, show regrets in falling, or struggle, murmuring, to return
to a past which can never return,--a fact of which they themselves are
well aware. Compelled to do without the choice exotics in the midst of
which she had lived, and which set off so charmingly her whole being
(for it is impossible not to compare her to