d still I cannot persuade myself that young Mme. du Bruel used to
display her ankles, and the rest, to all Paris, with the light of
a hundred gas-jets pouring upon her,' Mme. Anselme Popinot remarked
naively.

"From this point of view, July 1830 inaugurated an era not unlike the
time of the Empire, when a waiting woman was received at Court in the
person of Mme. Garat, a chief-justice's 'lady.' Tullia had completely
broken, as you may guess, with all her old associates; of her former
acquaintances, she only recognized those who could not compromise her.
At the time of her marriage she had taken a very charming little
hotel between a court and a garden, lavishing money on it with wild
extravagance and putting the best part of her furniture and du Bruel's
into it. Everything that she thought common or ordinary was sold. To
find anything comparable to her sparkling splendor, you could only look
back to the days when Sophie Arnould, a Guimard, or a Duthe, in all her
glory, squandered the fortunes of princes.

"How far did this sumptuous existence affect du Bruel? It is a delicate
question to ask, and a still more delicate one to answer. A single
incident will suffice to give you an idea of Tullia's crotchets. Her
bed-spread of Brussels lace was worth ten thousand francs. A famous
actress had another like it. As soon as Claudine heard this, she allowed
her cat, a splendid Angora, to sleep on the bed. That trait gives you
the woman. Du Bruel dared not say a word; he was ordered to spread
abroad that challenge in luxury, so that it might reach the other.
Tullia was very fond of this gift from the Duc de Rhetore; but one day,
five years after her marriage, she played with her cat to such purpose
that the coverlet--furbelows, flounces, and all--was torn to shreds,
and replaced by a sensible quilt, a quilt that was a quilt, and not a
symptom of the peculiar form of insanity which drives these women to
make up by an insensate luxury for the childish days when they lived on
raw apples, to quote the expression of a journalist. The day when the
bed-spread was torn to tatters marked a new epoch in her married life.

"Cursy was remarkable for his ferocious industry. Nobody suspects the
source to which Paris owes the patch-and-powder eighteenth century
vaudevilles that flooded the stage. Those thousand-and-one vaudevilles,
which raised such an outcry among the _feuilletonistes_, were written
at Mme. du Bruel's express desire. She insi