onduct causes me much surprise and no less
distress. Not content with rending my heart with your disdain, you
have been so little thoughtful as to retain a toothbrush, which my
means will not permit me to replace, my estates being mortgaged
beyond their value.

"'Adieu, too fair and too ungrateful friend! May we meet again in
a better world.

"'CHARLES EDWARD.'"

"Assuredly (to avail ourselves yet further of Sainte-Beuve's Babylonish
dialect), this far outpasses the raillery of Sterne's _Sentimental
Journey_; it might be Scarron without his grossness. Nay, I do not know
but that Moliere in his lighter mood would not have said of it, as of
Cyrano de Bergerac's best--'This is mine.' Richelieu himself was not
more complete when he wrote to the princess waiting for him in the
Palais Royal--'Stay there, my queen, to charm the scullion lads.' At
the same time, Charles Edward's humor is less biting. I am not sure that
this kind of wit was known among the Greeks and Romans. Plato, possibly,
upon a closer inspection approaches it, but from the austere and musical
side--"

"No more of that jargon," the Marquise broke in, "in print it may be
endurable; but to have it grating upon my ears is a punishment which I
do not in the least deserve."

"He first met Claudine on this wise," continued Nathan. "It was one of
the unfilled days, when Youth is a burden to itself; days when youth,
reduced by the overweening presumption of Age to a condition of
potential energy and dejection, emerges therefrom (like Blondet under
the Restoration), either to get into mischief or to set about some
colossal piece of buffoonery, half excused by the very audacity of its
conception. La Palferine was sauntering, cane in hand, up and down the
pavement between the Rue de Grammont and the Rue de Richelieu, when in
the distance he descried a woman too elegantly dressed, covered, as he
phrased it, with a great deal of portable property, too expensive and
too carelessly worn for its owner to be other than a princess of the
court or of the stage, it was not easy at first to say which. But after
July 1830, in his opinion, there is no mistaking the indications--the
princess can only be a princess of the stage.

"The Count came up and walked by her side as if she had given him an
assignation. He followed her with a courteous persistence, a persistence
in good taste, giving the lady from time to ti