s with that intellectual class whose strength lies in
pirouettes, and whose gifts are short petticoats. In a word, whatever
was "notorious" was her natural prey; a great painter, a great radical,
a great basso, a great traveller; any one to lionize, anything to hang
history upon; to enlist, even "for one night only," in that absurd
comedy which was performed at her house, and to display among her
acquaintances as another in that long catalogue of those who came to lay
the tribute of their genius at her feet.

That a large section of society was disposed to be rude and ungenerous
enough to think her a bore, is a fact that we are, however unwilling,
obliged to confess; but her actual influence was little affected by
the fact. The real serious business of life is often carried on in
localities surrounded by innumerable inconveniences. Men buy and sell
their millions, subsidize states, and raise loans in dens dark and
dismal enough to be prison-cells. In the same way, the Villino was a
recognized rendezvous of all who wanted to hear what was going on in the
world, and who wished to be d la hauteur of every current scandal of
the day. Not that such was ever the tone of the conversation; on the
contrary, it was "all taste and the musical glasses," the "naughty talk"
being the mere asides of the scene.

Now, in that season of foreign life which precedes the Carnival, and on
those nights when there is no opera, any one benevolent enough to open
his doors to receive is sure of full houses; so the Villino "improved
the occasion," by announcing a series of Tuesdays and Fridays, which
were, as the papers say, frequented by all the rank and fashion of the
metropolis. It is at one of these "at homes" that we would now present
our reader, not, indeed, during the full moon of the reception, when
the crowded rooms, suffocating with heat, were crammed with visitors,
talking in every tongue of Europe, and every imaginable dialect of each.
The great melee tournament was over, and a few lingered over the now
empty lists, discussing in familiar converse the departed guests and the
events of the evening.

This privy council consisted of the reader's old acquaintance,
Haggerstone, a Russo-Polish Count Petrolaffski, a dark, sallow-skinned,
odd-looking gentleman, whose national predilections had raised him to
the rank of an enemy to the Emperor, but whose private resources, it
was rumored, came from the Imperial treasury to reward his services