m shoes to bridles he depended
wholly on his groom,--all of which will sufficiently explain to you that
this semi-bachelor had nothing actually of his own, neither mind, taste,
position, or absurdity; even his fortune came from his fathers. After
having tasted the displeasures of marriage he was so content to find
himself once more a bachelor that he said among his friends, "I was born
with a caul" (that is, to good luck).

Pleased above all things to be able to live without the costs of making
an appearance, to which husbands are constrained, his house, in which
since the death of his father nothing had been changed, resembled those
of masters who are travelling; he lived there little, never dined, and
seldom slept there. Here follows the reason for such indifference.

After various amorous adventures, bored by women of fashion of the
kind who are truly bores, and who plant too many thorny hedges around
happiness, he had married after a fashion, as we shall see, a certain
Madame Schontz, celebrated in the world of Fanny Beaupre, Susanne du
Val-Noble, Florine, Mariette, Jenny Cadine, etc. This world,--of which
one of our artists wittily remarked at the frantic moment of an opera
_galop_, "When one thinks that all _that_ is lodged and clothed and
lives well, what a fine idea it gives us of mankind!"--this world has
already irrupted elsewhere into this history of French manners and
customs of the nineteenth century; but to paint it with fidelity, the
historian should proportion the number of such personages to the diverse
endings of their strange careers, which terminate either in
poverty under its most hideous aspect, or by premature death often
self-inflicted, or by lucky marriages, occasionally by opulence.

Madame Schontz, known at first under the name of La Petite-Aurelie, to
distinguish her from one of her rivals far less clever than herself,
belongs to the highest class of those women whose social utility
cannot be questioned by the prefect of the Seine, nor by those who
are interested in the welfare of the city of Paris. Certainly the Rat,
accused of demolishing fortunes which frequently never existed, might
better be compared to a beaver. Without the Aspasias of the Notre-Dame
de Lorette quarter, far fewer houses would be built in Paris. Pioneers
in fresh stucco, they have gone, towed by speculation, along the
heights of Montmartre, pitching their tents in those solitudes of carved
free-stone, the like of which