ose
and verse to immortality, like the late Montyon."

By dint of being prodded, the marquis was brought to see the hollowness
of the turf; he realized that economy of sixty thousand francs; and the
next year Madame Schontz remarked to him,--

"I don't cost you anything now, Arthur."

Many rich men envied the marquis and endeavored to entice Madame Schontz
away from him, but like the Russian prince they wasted their old age.

"Listen to me," she said to Finot, now become immensely rich. "I am
certain that Rochefide would forgive me a little passion if I fell in
love with any one, but one doesn't leave a marquis with a kind heart
like that for a _parvenu_ like you. You couldn't keep me in the position
in which Arthur has placed me; he has made me half a wife and a lady,
and that's more than you could do even if you married me."

This was the last nail which clinched the fetters of that happy
galley-slave, for the speech of course reached the ears for which it was
intended.

The fourth phase had begun, that of _habit_, the final victory in these
plans of campaign, which make the women of this class say of a man, "I
hold him!" Rochefide, who had just bought the little hotel in the name
of Mademoiselle Josephine Schiltz (a trifle of eighty thousand francs),
had reached, at the moment the Duchesse de Grandlieu was forming plans
about him, the stage of deriving vanity from his mistress (whom he now
called Ninon II.), by vaunting her scrupulous honesty, her excellent
manners, her education, and her wit. He had merged his own defects,
merits, tastes, and pleasures in Madame Schontz, and he found himself
at this period of his life, either from lassitude, indifference, or
philosophy, a man unable to change, who clings to wife or mistress.

We may understand the position won in five years by Madame Schontz from
the fact that presentation at her house had to be proposed some time
before it was granted. She refused to receive dull rich people and
smirched people; and only departed from this rule in favor of certain
great names of the aristocracy.

"They," she said, "have a right to be stupid because they are
well-bred."

She possessed ostensibly the three hundred thousand francs which
Rochefide had given her, and which a certain good fellow, a broker named
Gobenheim (the only man of that class admitted to her house) invested
and reinvested for her. But she manipulated for herself secretly a
little fortune of two hundred t