f Italy.
Picture her to yourself as I once saw her at a masquerade at the
prefecture. Round her superb figure swept an ample robe of crimson
velvet looped up with bands of gold. Her bare arms, models worthy of the
chisel of Canova, gleamed from the rich sables which lined the hanging
sleeves of her dress. Her hair, dark as night, was gathered up in the
high fashion Sir Joshua Reynolds loved to depict. A half-moon of
enormous diamonds fastened a plume over her left temple, and her neck
and fingers flashed back the colors of the rainbow from a thousand gems.
As to her face, it was radiant. Rich color flushed her cheeks, her eyes
sparkled with animation when she spoke; but at times, when her features
resumed a calm after conversation, she resembled the portraits of some
of the famous Italian women of the Renaissance--her own ancestress, for
instance, Bianca Visconti, duchess of Milan, or Veronica Cibo, or
Lucrezia Petroni, whose daughter was the ill-fated Beatrice Cenci. And
now come by the fascinating Mrs. Lloyd, whom all the world knows and
likes; grand-looking Mrs. Senator Grymes of Louisiana, a witty,
brilliant old lady, whose salon is one of the most elegant in Nice;
Baron Haussmann, and with him his colossal daughter, Madame de Perneti,
the handsomest of giantesses, who was once asked to join in private
theatricals, but when the stage was built up in her friend's
drawing-room, being about five feet from the level of the rest of the
chamber, it was discovered that _la belle Caryatide_, as her friends
call her, could not act on it, for the simple reason that she was a full
head taller than the scenery; clever Madame de Skariatine, the daughter
of the famous Count Schouvalof (the "Shoveloff" of our times), who,
after being Russian ambassador half over Europe, turned Barnabite monk
at Rome; Lady Dalling and Bulwer, the great duke of Wellington's niece,
and now the widow of one of England's most illustrious statesmen;
hospitable Marquise de St. Agnan, and her pretty daughter, Mademoiselle
Henriette; and Princess Souvarow, _ci-devant_ widow Apraxine, _ci-devant_
widow Kisselof, the most fascinating of Russian princesses, and one of
the greatest of female gamblers, who one night broke the bank at Monte
Carlo for two hundred and fifty thousand francs, and lost them the next.
On the opposite side of the way, screening herself from observation,
demurely clad in sober-colored attire, Madame Volnis passes along from
some mission