sse, and the true article on the man
and his work, very different from the notices ready for to-morrow's
newspapers. His work was a 'Journey in Val d'Andorre,' and two reports
published at the National Press, relating to the time when he was
Superintendent at the Beaux-Arts. The man was a sort of shrewd attorney,
creeping and cringing, with a permanent bow and an apologetic attitude,
which seemed to ask your pardon for his decorations, your pardon for
his insignia, your pardon for his place in the Academie--where his
experience as a man of business was useful in fusing together a number
of different elements, with none of which he could well have been
classed--your pardon for the amazing success which had raised so high
such a worthless winged grub. It was remembered that at an official
dinner he had said of himself complacently, as he bustled round the
table with a napkin on his arm, 'What an excellent servant I should have
made!' And it might have been written on his tomb.

And while they moralised upon the nothingness of his life, his corpse,
the remains of nothing, was receiving the honours of death. Carriage
after carriage drew up at the church; liveries brown and liveries blue
came and disappeared; long-frocked footmen bowed to the pavement with
a pompous banging of doors and steps; the groups of journalists
respectfully made way, now for the Duchess Padovani, stately and proud,
now for Madame Ancelin, blooming in her crape, now for Madame Eviza,
whose Jewish eyes shone through her veil with blaze enough to attract
a constable--all the ladies of the Academie, assembled in full
congregation to practise their worship, not so much by a service to
the memory of Loisillon, as by contemplation of their living idols, the
'deities' made and fashioned by the cunning of their little hands, the
work upon which, as women, they had employed the superabundance of their
energy, artfulness, ambition, and pride. Some actresses had come too,
on the pretext that the deceased had been the president of some sort
of Actors' Orphanage, but moved in reality by the frantic determination
'not to be out of it,' which belongs to their class. Their expressions
of woe were such that they might have been taken for near relations. A
carriage suddenly drawing up set down a distracted group of black veils,
whose sorrow was distressing to witness. The widow, at last? No, it is
Marguerite Oger, the great sensational actress, whose appearance excites