adorns the European streets of Amsterdam,
Milan, Stockholm, London, and Moscow, architectural steppes where the
wind rustles innumerable papers on which a void is divulged by the
words, _Apartments to let_.

The situation of these dames is determined by that which they take in
the apocryphal regions. If the house is near the line traced by the rue
de Provence, the woman has an income, her budget prospers; but if she
approaches the farther line of the Boulevard Exterieur or rises towards
the horrid town of Batignolles, she is without resources. When Monsieur
de Rochefide first encountered Madame Schontz, she lived on the third
floor of the only house that remained in the rue de Berlin; thus she was
camping on the border-land between misery and its reverse. This person
was not really named, as you may suppose, either Schontz or Aurelie.
She concealed the name of her father, an old soldier of the Empire, that
perennial colonel who always appears at the dawn of all these feminine
existences either as father or seducer. Madame Schontz had received the
gratuitous education of Saint-Denis, where young girls are admirably
brought up, but where, unfortunately, neither husbands nor openings
in life are offered to them when they leave the school,--an admirable
creation of the Emperor, which now lacks but one thing, the Emperor
himself!

"I shall be there, to provide for the daughters of my faithful legions,"
he replied to a remark of one of his ministers, who foresaw the future.

Napoleon had also said, "I shall be there!" for the members of the
Institute; to whom they had better give no salary than send them eighty
francs each month, a wage that is less than that of certain clerks!

Aurelie was really the daughter of the intrepid Colonel Schiltz, a
leader of those bold Alsacian guerillas who came near saving the Emperor
in the campaign of France. He died at Metz,--robbed, pillaged, ruined.
In 1814 Napoleon put the little Josephine Schiltz, then about nine
years old, at Saint-Denis. Having lost both father and mother and being
without a home and without resources, the poor child was not dismissed
from the institution on the second return of the Bourbons. She was
under-mistress of the school till 1827, but then her patience gave way;
her beauty seduced her. When she reached her majority Josephine Schiltz,
the Empress's goddaughter, was on the verge of the adventurous life of
a courtesan, persuaded to that doubtful future by the