Project Gutenberg's Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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Title: Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski

Author: Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Release Date: November 6, 2007 [EBook #23362]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MADEMOISELLE OLYMPE ZABRISKI ***

Produced by David Widger

MADEMOISELLE OLYMPE ZABRISKI

By Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright, 1873, 1885, and 1901

I.

We are accustomed to speak with a certain light irony of the tendency
which women have to gossip, as if the sin itself, if it is a sin, were
of the gentler sex, and could by no chance be a masculine peccadillo.
So far as my observation goes, men are as much given to small talk as
women, and it is undeniable that we have produced the highest type of
gossiper extant. Where will you find, in or out of literature, such
another droll, delightful, chatty busybody as Samuel Pepys, Esq.,
Secretary to the Admiralty in the reigns of those fortunate gentlemen
Charles II. and James II. of England? He is the king of tattlers as
Shakespeare is the king of poets.

If it came to a matter of pure gossip, I would back Our Club against
the Sorosis or any women's club in existence. Whenever you see in our
drawing-room four or five young fellows lounging in easy-chairs, cigar
in hand, and now and then bringing their heads together over the small
round Japanese table which is always the pivot of these social circles,
you may be sure that they are discussing Tom's engagement, or Dick's
extravagance, or Harry's hopeless passion for the younger Miss
Fleurdelys. It is here old Tippleton gets execrated for that everlasting
_bon mot_ of his which was quite a success at dinner-parties forty years
ago; it is here the belle of the season passes under the scalpels of
merciless young surgeons; it is here B's financial condition is handled
in a way that would make B's hair stand on end; it is here, in short,
that everything is canvassed--everything that happens in our set, I
mean, much that never happens, and a great deal that could not possibly
happen. It was at Our Club that I learned the pa