“You know the effect of fair hair and blue eyes in the soft, voluptuous decorous dance?  Such a girl does not knock audaciously at your heart, like the dark-haired damsels that seem to say after the fashion of Spanish beggars, ’Your money or your life; give me five francs or take my contempt!’ These insolent and somewhat dangerous beauties may find favor in the sight of many men, but to my thinking the blonde that has the good fortune to look extremely tender and yielding, while foregoing none of her rights to scold, to tease, to use unmeasured language, to be jealous without grounds, to do anything, in short, that makes woman adorable,—­the fair-haired girl, I say, will always be more sure to marry than the ardent brunette.  Firewood is dear, you see.

“Isaure, white as an Alsacienne (she first saw the light at Strasbourg, and spoke German with a slight and very agreeable French accent), danced to admiration.  Her feet, omitted on the passport, though they really might have found a place there under the heading Distinguishing Signs, were remarkable for their small size, and for that particular something which old-fashioned dancing masters used to call flic-flac, a something that put you in mind of Mlle. Mars’ agreeable delivery, for all the Muses are sisters, and the dancer and poet alike have their feet upon the earth.  Isaure’s feet spoke lightly and swiftly with a clearness and precision which augured well for things of the heart. ‘Elle a duc flic-flac,’ was old Marcel’s highest word of praise, and old Marcel was the dancing master that deserved the epithet of ‘the Great.’  People used to say ‘the Great Marcel,’ as they said ‘Frederick the Great,’ and in Frederick’s time.”

“Did Marcel compose any ballets?” inquired Finot.

“Yes, something in the style of Les Quatre Elements and L’Europe galante.”

“What times they were, when great nobles dressed the dancers!” said Finot.

“Improper!” said Bixiou.  “Isaure did not raise herself on the tips of her toes, she stayed on the ground, she swayed in the dance without jerks, and neither more nor less voluptuously than a young lady ought to do.  There was a profound philosophy in Marcel’s remark that every age and condition had its dance; a married woman should not dance like a young girl, nor a little jackanapes like a capitalist, nor a soldier like a page; he even went so far as to say that the infantry ought not to dance like the cavalry, and from this point he proceeded to classify the world at large.  All these fine distinctions seem very far away.”

“Ah!” said Blondet, “you have set your finger on a great calamity.  If Marcel had been properly understood, there would have been no French Revolution.”