minister
Bertin, who had lived for fifteen years with Mlle. Hus, of the Comedie
Francaise, had given her a set of furniture that was valued at five
hundred thousand livres.

"Mlle. Grandi, of the Opera, a dancer of mediocre talent and with a very
commonplace face, was complaining one evening at the theatre of having
lost the good graces of a protector who had given her a thousand louis
in five weeks; one of those present said to her that she would readily
find some one to take his place. Mlle. Grandi replied that it was not so
easy as might be supposed, but that, in any case, she was firmly decided
not to accept any new liaison excepting on the condition that she
received a carriage and two good horses, with at least a hundred louis
of income assured to maintain this equipage. The conversation then
ended, but the next day there arrived at Mlle. Grandi's lodging a
magnificent carriage drawn by two horses and followed by three others
led behind it, and in the carriage was found one hundred and thirty
thousand livres in specie."

Sometimes these scandalous chronicles took another turn. Mlle. Guimard,
also of the Opera, "a celebrated dancer, who was openly protected by
the Marechal de Soubise, did not shine by any excessive faithfulness to
her protector; she accepted a rendezvous in one of the faubourgs of
Paris, and saw that there was so much misery in this quarter that she
distributed a portion of the two thousand ecus which she had received as
the price of her complaisance among the poor people whom she encountered
and carried the rest to the cure of Saint-Roch, requesting him to have
the goodness to distribute it among the poor."

The gardens of the Palais-Royal figure largely in the history of Paris
as the scene of many of the more important incidents of the constantly
changing social life of the capital. In the latter part of the
eighteenth century, this locality was so much the favorite resort of the
_femmes galantes_ that the honest bourgeois and their wives were finally
compelled to abandon it altogether; in the latter part of 1771, the
former were accordingly all expelled, but by the summer of 1772 they had
all returned. It is related that the Duc de Chartres, walking here one
day, passed one of these ladies and was so much struck by her appearance
that he turned to the gentlemen accompanying him and said: "Ah! how ugly
she is!" To which the offended fair promptly replied: "You have much
uglier ones in your ser