f her
power that she made this morning answered her highest expectations.
Thanks to her manoeuvres, sentimental, high-flown, and romantic,
Valerie, without committing herself to any promises, obtained for her
husband the appointment as deputy head of the office and the Cross of
the Legion of Honor.

The campaign was not carried out without little dinners at the _Rocher
de Cancale_, parties to the play, and gifts in the form of lace,
scarves, gowns, and jewelry. The apartment in the Rue du Doyenne was
not satisfactory; the Baron proposed to furnish another magnificently
in a charming new house in the Rue Vanneau.

Monsieur Marneffe got a fortnight's leave, to be taken a month hence
for urgent private affairs in the country, and a present in money; he
promised himself that he would spend both in a little town in
Switzerland, studying the fair sex.

While Monsieur Hulot thus devoted himself to the lady he was
"protecting," he did not forget the young artist. Comte Popinot,
Minister of Commerce, was a patron of Art; he paid two thousand francs
for a copy of the _Samson_ on condition that the mould should be
broken, and that there should be no _Samson_ but his and Mademoiselle
Hulot's. The group was admired by a Prince, to whom the model sketch
for the clock was also shown, and who ordered it; but that again was
to be unique, and he offered thirty thousand francs for it.

Artists who were consulted, and among them Stidmann, were of opinion
that the man who had sketched those two models was capable of
achieving a statue. The Marshal Prince de Wissembourg, Minister of
War, and President of the Committee for the subscriptions to the
monument of Marshal Montcornet, called a meeting, at which it was
decided that the execution of the work should be placed in Steinbock's
hands. The Comte de Rastignac, at that time Under-secretary of State,
wished to possess a work by the artist, whose glory was waxing amid
the acclamations of his rivals. Steinbock sold to him the charming
group of two little boys crowning a little girl, and he promised to
secure for the sculptor a studio attached to the Government
marble-quarries, situated, as all the world knows, at Le Gros-Caillou.

This was a success, such success as is won in Paris, that is to say,
stupendous success, that crushes those whose shoulders and loins are
not strong enough to bear it--as, be it said, not unfrequently is the
case. Count Wenceslas Steinbock was written about in a