tager, and takes her wine neat.
She professes an undisguised contempt for the silly women of our century
who live for a week on a partridge, and inundate with water grand
sentiments which they entangle in long phrases. She has always been, and
still is, very positive, and her word is prompt and easily understood.
She never shrinks from using the most appropriate word to express her
meaning. So much the worse, if some delicate ears object! She heartily
detests hypocrisy.

She believes in God, but she believes also in M. de Voltaire, so that
her devotion is, to say the least, problematical. However, she is on
good terms with the curate of her parish, and is very particular about
the arrangement of her dinner on the days she honours him with an
invitation to her table. She seems to consider him a subaltern, very
useful to her salvation, and capable of opening the gate of paradise for
her.

Such as she is, she is shunned like the plague. Everybody dreads her
loud voice, her terrible indiscretion, and the frankness of speech which
she affects, in order to have the right of saying the most unpleasant
things which pass through her head. Of all her family, there only
remains her granddaughter, whose father died very young.

Of a fortune originally large, and partly restored by the indemnity
allowed by the government, but since administered in the most careless
manner, she has only been able to preserve an income of twenty thousand
francs, which diminishes day by day. She is, also, proprietor of the
pretty little house which she inhabits, situated near the Invalides,
between a rather narrow court-yard, and a very extensive garden.

So circumstanced, she considers herself the most unfortunate of God's
creatures, and passes the greater part of her life complaining of her
poverty. From time to time, especially after some exceptionally bad
speculation, she confesses that what she fears most is to die in a
pauper's bed.

A friend of M. Daburon's presented him one evening to the Marchioness
d'Arlange, having dragged him to her house in a mirthful mood, saying,
"Come with me, and I will show you a phenomenon, a ghost of the past in
flesh and bone."

The marchioness rather puzzled the magistrate the first time he was
admitted to her presence. On his second visit, she amused him very much;
for which reason, he came again. But after a while she no longer amused
him, though he still continued a faithful and constant visitor to the