loons and behind the scenes at the opera. Lauraguais
had the temerity to attempt to carry off the young beauty, but, the
enterprise failing, he had recourse to another expedient. One evening,
supping with some friends, the conversation turned naturally on the
star which had just risen, and there was much jesting over the maternal
anxiety of Arnould _mere_. Lauraguais, laughing, instantly offered to
lay an immense wager that within fifteen days Mme. Arnould would no
longer attend Sophie to the opera. The bet was taken, and the next day
a handsome but modest-looking young man, professing to be from the
country, applied at the Hotel de Chatillon for lodgings. The fascinating
tongue of young Duval (for he represented that he was a poet of that
name, who hoped to get a play taken by the managers) soon beguiled both
mother and daughter, and he began to make love to Sophie under the
very maternal eyes. The romantic girl listened with delight to the
protestations and vows of the young provincial poet, though she had
disdained the flatteries of the troops of court gallants who besieged
the opera-house stage when she sang. The _finale_ of this pretty
pastoral was a moonlight flitting one night. The couple eloped, and the
Comte de Lauraguais won his wager that Mme. Arnould would not longer
accompany her daughter to the opera, and with the wager the most
beautiful and fascinating woman of the time.

Sophie, finding herself freed from all conventional shackles, gave full
play to her tastes, both for luxury and intellectual society. Her house,
the Hotel Rambouillet, was transformed into a palace, and both at home
and in the green-room of the opera she was surrounded by a throng of
noblemen, diplomats, soldiers, poets, artists--in a word, all the most
brilliant men of Paris, who crowded her receptions and besieged her
footsteps. The attentions paid the brilliant Sophie caused terrible fits
of jealousy on the part of Lauraguais, and their life for several years,
though there appears to have been sincere attachment on both sides, was
embittered by quarrels and recriminations. Sophie seems to have been
faithful to her relation with Lauraguais, though she never took pains
to deprecate his anger or avert his suspicions. Discovering that he
was intriguing with an operatic fair one, she contrived that Lauraguais
should come on her _tete-a-tete_ with a Knight of Malta. To his
reproaches she answered, "This gentleman is only fulfilling his vows