men of
letters, new-fledged to fame, who rejected both ancients and moderns,
and strove to make themselves a great reputation by accomplishing little
or nothing.

The conduct of Madame Schontz, a triumph of tactics, ought to reveal
to you her superiority. In the first place, these ten or a dozen young
fellows amused Arthur; they supplied him with witty sayings and clever
opinions on all sorts of topics, and did not put in doubt the fidelity
of the mistress; moreover, they proclaimed her a woman who was eminently
intelligent. These living advertisements, these perambulating articles,
soon set up Madame Schontz as the most agreeable woman to be found in
the borderland which separates the thirteenth arrondissement from the
twelve others. Her rivals--Suzanne Gaillard, who, in 1838, had won the
advantage over her of becoming a wife married in legitimate marriage,
Fanny Beaupre, Mariette, Antonia--spread calumnies that were more than
droll about the beauty of those young men and the complacent good-nature
with which Monsieur de Rochefide welcomed them. Madame Schontz, who
could distance, as she said, by three _blagues_ the wit of those ladies,
said to them one night at a supper given by Nathan to Florine, after
recounting her fortune and her success, "Do as much yourselves!"--a
speech which remained in their memory.

It was during this period that Madame Schontz made Arthur sell his
race-horses, through a series of considerations which she no doubt
derived from the critical mind of Claude Vignon, one of her _habitues_.

"I can conceive," she said one night, after lashing the horses for some
time with her lively wit, "that princes and rich men should set their
hearts on horse-flesh, but only for the good of the country, not for the
paltry satisfactions of a betting man. If you had a stud farm on your
property and could raise a thousand or twelve hundred horses, and if all
the horses of France and of Navarre could enter into one great solemn
competition, it would be fine; but you buy animals as the managers of
theatres trade in artists; you degrade an institution to a gambling
game; you make a Bourse of legs, as you make a Bourse of stocks. It is
unworthy. Don't you spend sixty thousand francs sometimes merely to read
in the newspapers: 'Lelia, belonging to Monsieur de Rochefide beat by a
length Fleur-de-Genet the property of Monsieur le Duc de Rhetore'? You
had much better give that money to poets, who would carry you in pr