Mme. Ancelot is sitting quietly by her fireside, one evening in October, (some short time after the establishment of the monarchy of July,) waiting to hear the result of a representation at the Theatre Francais, where a piece of her own is for the first time being performed.  All at once, she hears several carriages stop at her door, a number of persons rush up the stairs, and she finds herself in the arms of the Duchesse d’Abrantes, who was resolved, as she says, to be the first to congratulate her on her success.  The hour is a late one; supper is served, and conversation is prolonged into the “small hours.”  All at once Mme. d’Abrantes exclaims, with an explosion of delight,—­“Ah! what a charming time is the night! one is so deliciously off for talking! so safe! so secure! safe from bores and from duns!” (on ne craint ni les ennuyeux ni les creanciers.’)

Madame Ancelot affirms that this speech made a tremendous effect, and that her guests looked at each other in astonishment.  If this really was the case, we can only observe that it speaks well for the Parisians of the epoch at which it occurred; for, assuredly, at the present day, no announcement of the kind would astonish or scandalize any one.  People in “good society,” nowadays, in France, have got into a habit of living from hand to mouth, and of living by expedients, simply because they have not the strength of mind to live out of society, and because the life of “the world” forces them to expenses utterly beyond what they have any means of providing for.  However, we are inclined to believe that some five-and-twenty years ago this was in no degree a general case, and that Mme. d’Abrantes might perfectly well have been the first maitresse de maison to whom it happened.

“Alas!” sighs Mme. Ancelot, commenting upon her excellent friend’s strange confidence,—­“it was the secret of her whole life that she thus revealed to us in a moment of abandon,—­the secret of an existence that tried still to reflect the splendors of the Imperial epoch, and that was at the same time perplexed and tormented by all the thousand small miseries of pecuniary embarrassment.  There were the two extremes of a life that to the end excited my surprise.  Grandeur! want!—­between those two opposites oscillated every day of the last years of the Duchesse d’Abrantes; the exterior and visible portion of that life arranged itself well or ill, as it best could, in the middle,—­now apparently colored by splendor, and now degraded by distress; but at bottom the existence was unvaryingly what I state.”

Madame d’Abrantes, at the period of her greatest notoriety, occupied the ground-floor of a hotel in the Rue Rochechouart, with a garden, where dancing was often introduced upon the lawn.  Some remnants of the glories of Imperialism were collected there, but the principal habitues were men of letters, artists, and young men who danced well! (les jeunes beaux qui dansaient bien!) That one phrase characterizes at once the ex-belle of the Empire, the contemporary of the sentimental Hortense de Beauharnais, and of the more than legere Pauline Borghese.