rms that this speech made a tremendous effect, and
that her guests looked at each other in astonishment. If this really
was the case, we can only observe that it speaks well for the
Parisians of the epoch at which it occurred; for, assuredly, at the
present day, no announcement of the kind would astonish or scandalize
any one. People in "good society," nowadays, in France, have got into
a habit of living from hand to mouth, and of living by expedients,
simply because they have not the strength of mind to live _out_
of society, and because the life of "the world" forces them to
expenses utterly beyond what they have any means of providing
for. However, we are inclined to believe that some five-and-twenty
years ago this was in no degree a general case, and that Mme.
d'Abrantes might perfectly well have been the first _maitresse de
maison_ to whom it happened.

"Alas!" sighs Mme. Ancelot, commenting upon her excellent friend's
strange confidence,--"it was the secret of her whole life that she
thus revealed to us in a moment of _abandon_,--the secret of an
existence that tried still to reflect the splendors of the Imperial
epoch, and that was at the same time perplexed and tormented by all
the thousand small miseries of pecuniary embarrassment. There were the
two extremes of a life that to the end excited my surprise. Grandeur!
want!--between those two opposites oscillated every day of the last
years of the Duchesse d'Abrantes; the exterior and visible portion of
that life arranged itself well or ill, as it best could, in the
middle,--now apparently colored by splendor, and now degraded by
distress; but at bottom the existence was unvaryingly what I state."

Madame d'Abrantes, at the period of her greatest notoriety, occupied
the ground-floor of a hotel in the Rue Rochechouart, with a garden,
where dancing was often introduced upon the lawn. Some remnants of
the glories of Imperialism were collected there, but the principal
_habitues_ were men of letters, artists, and young men who danced
well! (_les jeunes beaux qui dansaient bien!_) That one phrase
characterizes at once the ex-_belle_ of the Empire, the
contemporary of the sentimental Hortense de Beauharnais, and of the
more than _legere_ Pauline Borghese.

To the "new society of July" Mme. d'Abrantes was an object of great
curiosity. "I dote on seeing that woman!" said Balzac, one evening,
to Mme. Ancelot. "Only fancy! she saw Napoleon Bonaparte as a mere
boy,--knew