ell me whom you prefer, Lamartine or
Boileau?"

"But, Bathilde, there is no connection," replied Madame Durmaitre, rather
sensibly and much too candidly.

"Ah!" rejoined Madame de Palme. And suddenly pointing me out with her
finger: "You perhaps prefer this gentleman, who also writes poetry?"

"No, madam," I said, "it is a mistake; I write none."

"Ah! I thought you did. I beg your pardon."

Madame Durmaitre, who doubtless owes the unalterable serenity of her soul
to the consciousness of her supreme beauty, had been content with smiling
with disdainful nonchalance. She dropped into the arm-chair, which I had
given up to her.

"What gloomy weather!" she said to me; "really, this autumnal sky weighs
upon the soul. I was looking out of the window; all the trees look like
cypress-trees, and the whole country looks like a graveyard. It would
really seem that----"

"No, ah! no. I beg of you, Nathalie," interrupted Madame de Palme, "say no
more. That's enough fun before breakfast. You'll make yourself sick."

"Well, now! my dear Bathilde, you must really have slept very badly last
night," said the beautiful widow.

"I, my dear? ah! do not say that. I had celestial, ecstatic dreams;
ecstasies, you know. My soul held converse with other souls--like your own
soul. Angels smiled at me through the foliage of the cypress-trees--and so
forth, and so forth!"

Madame Durmaitre blushed slightly, shrugged her shoulders, and took up the
review I had laid upon the mantel-piece.

"By the bye, Nathalie," resumed Madame de Palme, "do you know who we are
going to have at dinner to-day, in the way of men?" The good-natured
Nathalie mentioned Monsieur de Breuilly, two or three other married
gentlemen, and the parish priest.

"Then I am going away after breakfast," said the Little Countess, looking
at me.

"That's very polite to us," murmured Madame Durmaitre.

"You know," replied the other with imperturbable assurance, "that I only
like men's society, and there are three classes of individuals whom I do
not consider as belonging to that sex, or to any other; those are married
men, priests, and savants."

As she concluded this sentence, Madame de Palme cast another glance at me,
by which however, I had no need to understand that she included me in her
classification of neutral species; it could only be among the individuals
of the third category, though I have no claim to it whatever; but it does
not require much to be consider