s which
washerwomen discover in the bosom of households, and day after day these
girls would 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
trump