ne.'

"The word Bohemia tells you everything. Bohemia has nothing and lives
upon what it has. Hope is its religion; faith (in oneself) its creed;
and charity is supposed to be its budget. All these young men are
greater than their misfortune; they are under the feet of Fortune, yet
more than equal to Fate. Always ready to mount and ride an _if_, witty
as a _feuilleton_, blithe as only those can be that are deep in debt
and drink deep to match, and finally--for here I come to my point--hot
lovers and what lovers! Picture to yourself Lovelace, and Henri Quatre,
and the Regent, and Werther, and Saint-Preux, and Rene, and the Marechal
de Richelieu--think of all these in a single man, and you will have some
idea of their way of love. What lovers! Eclectic of all things in love,
they will serve up a passion to a woman's order; their hearts are like
a bill of fare in a restaurant. Perhaps they have never read Stendhal's
_De l'Amour_, but unconsciously they put it in practice. They have
by heart their chapters--Love-Taste, Love-Passion, Love-Caprice,
Love-Crystalized, and more than all, Love-Transient. All is good in
their eyes. They invented the burlesque axiom, 'In the sight of man, all
women are equal.' The actual text is more vigorously worded, but as in
my opinion the spirit is false, I do not stand nice upon the letter.

"My friend, madame, is named Gabriel Jean Anne Victor Benjamin
George Ferdinand Charles Edward Rusticoli, Comte de la Palferine. The
Rusticolis came to France with Catherine de Medici, having been ousted
about that time from their infinitesimal Tuscan sovereignty. They are
distantly related to the house of Este, and connected by marriage to
the Guises. On the day of Saint-Bartholomew they slew a goodly number
of Protestants, and Charles IX. bestowed the hand of the heiress of
the Comte de la Palferine upon the Rusticoli of that time. The Comte,
however, being a part of the confiscated lands of the Duke of Savoy,
was repurchased by Henri IV. when that great king so far blundered as
to restore the fief; and in exchange, the Rusticoli--who had borne arms
long before the Medici bore them to-wit, _argent_ a cross flory _azure_
(the cross flower-de-luced by letters patent granted by Charles IX.),
and a count's coronet, with two peasants for supporters with the motto
IN HOC SIGNO VINCIMUS--the Rusticoli, I repeat, retained their title,
and received a couple of offices under the crown with the government of
a pr