and thinking of Madame Schontz.

Madame Schontz was a pretty enough woman to put a very high price on the
interest on her beauty, while reserving absolute ownership for Lousteau,
the man of her heart. Like all those women who get the name in Paris of
_Lorettes_, from the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette, round about
which they dwell, she lived in the Rue Flechier, a stone's throw from
Lousteau. This lady took a pride and delight in teasing her friends by
boasting of having a Wit for her lover.

These details of Lousteau's life and fortune are indispensable, for this
penury and this bohemian existence of a man to whom Parisian luxury
had become a necessity, were fated to have a cruel influence on Dinah's
life. Those to whom the bohemia of Paris is familiar will now understand
how it was that, by the end of a fortnight, the journalist, up to his
ears in the literary environment, could laugh about his Baroness with
his friends and even with Madame Schontz. To such readers as regard such
things as utterly mean, it is almost useless to make excuses which they
will not accept.

"What did you do at Sancerre?" asked Bixiou the first time he met
Lousteau.

"I did good service to three worthy provincials--a Receiver-General
of Taxes, a little cousin of his, and a Public Prosecutor, who for ten
years had been dancing round and round one of the hundred 'Tenth Muses'
who adorn the Departments," said he. "But they had no more dared
to touch her than we touch a decorated cream at dessert till some
strong-minded person has made a hole in it."

"Poor boy!" said Bixiou. "I said you had gone to Sancerre to turn
Pegasus out to grass."

"Your joke is as stupid as my Muse is handsome," retorted Lousteau. "Ask
Bianchon, my dear fellow."

"A Muse and a Poet! A homoeopathic cure then!" said Bixiou.

On the tenth day Lousteau received a letter with the Sancerre post-mark.

"Good! very good!" said Lousteau.

"'Beloved friend, idol of my heart and soul----' twenty pages of it! all
at one sitting, and dated midnight! She writes when she finds herself
alone. Poor woman! Ah, ha! And a postscript--

"'I dare not ask you to write to me as I write, every day; still, I
hope to have a few lines from my dear one every week, to relieve my
mind.'--What a pity to burn it all! it is really well written," said
Lousteau to himself, as he threw the ten sheets of paper into the fire
after having read them. "That woman was born to reel off copy!"

Lou