n is capricious, and no one can foresee who shall be her
favorites, though she often exalts a banker's wife, or some woman of
very doubtful elegance and beauty, it certainly seems supernatural when
Fashion puts on constitutional airs and gives promotion for age. But
in this case Fashion had done as the world did, and accepted Madame
d'Espard as still young.

The Marquise, who was thirty-three by her register of birth, was
twenty-two in a drawing-room in the evening. But by what care, what
artifice! Elaborate curls shaded her temples. She condemned herself to
live in twilight, affecting illness so as to sit under the protecting
tones of light filtered through muslin. Like Diane de Poitiers, she used
cold water in her bath, and, like her again, the Marquise slept on a
horse-hair mattress, with morocco-covered pillows to preserve her hair;
she ate very little, only drank water, and observed monastic regularity
in the smallest actions of her life.

This severe system has, it is said, been carried so far as to the use of
ice instead of water, and nothing but cold food, by a famous Polish lady
of our day who spends a life, now verging on a century old, after the
fashion of a town belle. Fated to live as long as Marion Delorme, whom
history has credited with surviving to be a hundred and thirty, the old
vice-queen of Poland, at the age of nearly a hundred, has the heart
and brain of youth, a charming face, an elegant shape; and in her
conversation, sparkling with brilliancy like faggots in the fire, she
can compare the men and books of our literature with the men and books
of the eighteenth century. Living in Warsaw, she orders her caps of
Herbault in Paris. She is a great lady with the amiability of a mere
girl; she swims, she runs like a schoolboy, and can sink on to a sofa
with the grace of a young coquette; she mocks at death, and laughs at
life. After having astonished the Emperor Alexander, she can still amaze
the Emperor Nicholas by the splendor of her entertainments. She can
still bring tears to the eyes of a youthful lover, for her age is
whatever she pleases, and she has the exquisite self-devotion of a
grisette. In short, she is herself a fairy tale, unless, indeed, she is
a fairy.

Had Madame d'Espard known Madame Zayonseck? Did she mean to imitate
her career? Be that as it may, the Marquise proved the merits of the
treatment; her complexion was clear, her brow unwrinkled, her figure,
like that of Henri II.'s la