to her apartment; the
exquisite wines, perfect coffee, boxes of bonbons, refined chocolate,
and other dainties which furnished her repasts. She even went to the
length of inviting that old satyr Sacchi to her house, adding, in order
to insult me: "You will find no tiresome moral preachers on the
_convenances_ to frighten you away!" While as anxious as ever to lure me
back, she piqued herself on letting it be understood that she had given
me my dismissal. Indeed, I found it somewhat difficult to treat the
woman with that reserved civility which I wished to preserve toward her
in public.

The amusement I enjoyed in studying her new ways and manners compensated
for these gnat-bites. She had become in six months shameless and
affected, as meddlesome and garrulous as a magpie. She pretended to have
learned all kinds of important sciences, and gravely informed us that
the game _rocambol_ was derived from two English words. She had left off
wearing drawers, she said, because it was healthy to ventilate the body,
adding details of the most comical indecency. Always dreaming about
Paris, Venice had become a kind of sewer in her opinion. The Venetians
and Italians in general were a race of stupid mediocrities,
unenlightened and insupportable. "I am dying to get to Paris!" she
exclaimed; "there the rich financiers fling purses full of louis d'or at
actresses with as little regard as one flings a pear in Italy." And then
to show how well she had got rid of prejudices: "Ah! blessed power of
making love without the checks of a misguided education! To make love
through our lifetime is the supreme happiness of mortals!" Not a
word or a thought for her husband and two children.

[Illustration: COVIELLO (1550)

_Illustrating the Italian Commedia dell'Arte, or Impromptu Comedy_]

Every evening she filled the theatre with such a potent smell of musk,
that people complained and said it gave them the headache. "What a
prejudice!" she cried with a grimace in what she thought the French
style. "At Paris everything smells of musk, down to the very trees in
the Tuilleries gardens, against which ladies may have leant a moment."
She was taking French lessons; and her retentive memory made her catch
up phrases, which she flung about with volubility. Paris entered into
everything she said. She modelled her gait and action and tone of voice
upon what she conceived to be the Parisian manner, producing a most
laughable caricature which spoiled her