uld tell him the cancans
which were going the round of Alencon. He called them his "petticoat
gazettes," his "talking feuilletons." Never did Monsieur de Sartines
have spies more intelligent and less expensive, or minions who showed
more honor while displaying their rascality of mind. So it may be said
that in the mornings, while breakfasting, the chevalier usually amused
himself as much as the saints in heaven.

Suzanne was one of his favorites, a clever, ambitious girl, made of
the stuff of a Sophie Arnold, and handsome withal, as the handsomest
courtesan invited by Titian to pose on black velvet for a model of
Venus; although her face, fine about the eyes and forehead,
degenerated, lower down, into commonness of outline. Hers was a Norman
beauty, fresh, high-colored, redundant, the flesh of Rubens covering
the muscles of the Farnese Hercules, and not the slender articulations
of the Venus de' Medici, Apollo's graceful consort.

"Well, my child, tell me your great or your little adventure, whatever
it is."

The particular point about the chevalier which would have made him
noticeable from Paris to Pekin, was the gentle paternity of his manner
to grisettes. They reminded him of the illustrious operatic queens of
his early days, whose celebrity was European during a good third of
the eighteenth century. It is certain that the old gentleman, who had
lived in days gone by with that feminine nation now as much forgotten
as many other great things,--like the Jesuits, the Buccaneers, the
Abbes, and the Farmers-General,--had acquired an irresistible
good-humor, a kindly ease, a laisser-aller devoid of egotism, the
self-effacement of Jupiter with Alcmene, of the king intending to be
duped, who casts his thunderbolts to the devil, wants his Olympus full
of follies, little suppers, feminine profusions--but with Juno out of
the way, be it understood.

In spite of his old green damask dressing-gown and the bareness of the
room in which he sat, where the floor was covered with a shabby
tapestry in place of carpet, and the walls were hung with tavern-paper
presenting the profiles of Louis XVI. and members of his family,
traced among the branches of a weeping willow with other
sentimentalities invented by royalism during the Terror,--in spite of
his ruins, the chevalier, trimming his beard before a shabby old
toilet-table, draped with trumpery lace, exhaled an essence of the
eighteenth century. All the libertine graces of his yo