ed the first evening I spent here _en soiree_. Lovers! why the
married ladies hardly take the trouble to disguise their preferences.

"I was at an embassy reception the other night. Papa said it was like a
green-room, only not half so amusing. They talked in one corner as
openly as you might speak of the Prince Imperial, about Mademoiselle
Schneider's child. There were women of the company whose _liaisons_ are
as well known as their faces, and yet they were _parfaitement bien
recues_! Theresa is to be heard--or was to be heard till she went out of
fashion--in private salons, screaming her vulgar songs among the young
ladies. When I turn the corner just outside the hotel, what do I see in
one of the most fashionable print-shops? Why, three great Mabille prints
of the shockingly indecent description--with ladies and their
daughters looking at them. Those disagreeable pictures in the Burlington
Arcade are, my dearest Emmy, moral prints when compared with them. We
have imported all this. Paris is within ten hours and a half of London,
so we get French ways, as papa says, 'hot and hot.'"

[Illustration: ENGLISH VISITORS TO THE CLOSERIE DE LILAS.--SHOCKING!]

"Who admires domestic women now? Tell an English _creve_ that Miss Maria
is clever at a custard, and he will sneer at her. No. She must be witty,
pert; able to give him as good as he sends, as people say. Young Dumas
has done a very great deal of this harm; and he has made a fortune by
it. He has brought the Casino into the drawing-room, given _ces dames_ a
position in society, and made hundreds of young men ruin themselves for
the glory of being seen talking to a Cora Pearl. _Now_ what do you think
he has done. He has actually brought out a complete edition of his
pieces, with a preface, in which, Papa tells me, he plays the moralist.
He has unfolded all the vice--crowded the theatres to see a bad woman in
a consumption--painted the _demi-monde--with a purpose_! All the world
has laboured under the idea that the purpose was piles of gold. But now,
the locker being full, and the key turned, and in the young gentleman's
pocket, he dares to put himself in the robe of a professor, to say it
was not the money he cared about--it was the lesson. He is a reformer--a
worshipper of virtue! We shall have the author of _Jack Sheppard_ start
as a penologist soon. My dear, the cowardice of men when dealing with
poor women is bad enough; but it is not by half so repulsive as their
hy