ation, and were, I am afraid, equally selfish at
heart. To read the biographies of both--I do not mean those that pretend
to be historical--one would think that there had never been a grande
dame on the stage of the Comedie-Francaise before Rachel or contemporary
with her, though Augustine Brohan was decidedly more grande dame than
Rachel in every respect. It is the same with regard to De Morny. To the
chroniqueur during the Second Empire he was the only grand seigneur--the
rest were only seigneurs; but I am inclined to think that the
chroniqueur of those days had seen very few real grand seigneurs. To use
a popular locution, "they did not go thirteen to the dozen" at the court
of Napoleon III.; and among the people with whom De Morny came
habitually in contact, in the course of his financial and industrial
schemes, a grand seigneur was even a greater rarity than at the
Tuileries. If a kind of quiet impertinence to some of one's
fellow-creatures, and a tacitly expressed contempt for nearly the whole
of the rest, constitute the grand seigneur, then certainly De Morny
could have claimed the title. I have elsewhere noted the meeting of
Taglioni with her husband at De Morny's dinner-party. If it had been
arranged by the host with the view of effecting a reconciliation between
the couple, then nothing could have been more praiseworthy; but I am not
at all sure of it. If it were not, then it became an unpardonable joke
at the woman's expense, and in the worst taste; but the chroniqueur of
those days would have applauded it all the same.

Here are two stories which, at different times, were told by De Morny's
familiars and sycophants in order to stamp him the grand seigneur. Late
in the fifties he was an assiduous frequenter of the salons of a banker,
whose sisters-in-law happened to be very handsome. One evening, while
talking to one of them, they came to ask him to take a hand at
lansquenet. He had evidently no intention of leaving the society of the
lady for that of the gaming-table, and said so. Of course, his host was
in the wrong in pressing the thing, nevertheless one has yet to learn
that "two wrongs make one right."

"What will you play?" they asked, when they had as good as badgered him
away from his companion.

"The simple rouge and the noir. That's the quickest."

"How much for?"

"Ten thousand francs."

The stake seemed somewhat high, and no one cared to take it up. But the
host himself felt bound to set th