capital, and all are in communication with St. Petersburg, at last rested in Paris.  It was a favorable moment; the French government had offended the older powers by its presumption in chastising venerable Austria almost as severely as the Great Napoleon had done.  The Dobronowskas were let alone in the imperial city on the Seine; but, unfortunately, the important state functionaries soon became as tired of the countess’s plaints as their brothers on the Neva.  Reduced to the shifts of the penniless aristocrats, the two lived like the shabby genteel.  They made a desperate attempt to entrap their Grand-duke again.  But the victim had warning and the pair were stopped at Warsaw.  Here a beam of the sun, long withheld, glanced through the clouds and transiently warmed “the marrying mamma.”  A distant relative of hers, one Lergins, was an attache of the embassy and he fell in love with his “cousin” Iza, as the mother allowed the youth to call her.  As he had splendid prospects and seemed to be quite another man as regarded maternal control of Wanda’s husband, mamma dismissed her brilliant ignis fatuus and tried to have a clandestine marriage come off.  But the young secretary of embassy was not of age and again she was forced to depart for Paris—­that sink-hole for refugees of all sorts.  His family put pressure on the officiale who in turn applied it to the luckless intriguante.

Farewell, the future in which a semi-imperial coronet hand gleamed! even that where a cascade of gold coin inundated the new Danae.  Wearied of this constant grasping at the unattainable Iza, who had something of a heart, chose for herself, much as her elder had done, with happiness at home as the object; one fine morning, married M. Pierre Clemenceau, a young but rising sculptor.  He had on the previous visit of theirs to Paris, materially befriended them.  It was only gratitude after all, although he, enamored like an artist of this unrivaled beauty, would have sacrificed fortune to possess her.  Indeed, he sacrificed all—­even his honor, for he suffered himself to be gulled by her wiles as profoundly as he was infatuated by her charms.

At this point, as became a young woman telling of a relative’s iniquity, Kaiserina glazed the facts and gave a perversion.  It was later, therefore, that Felix Clemenceau learned in detail the whole mournful tale of a beautiful wanton’s ingrained perfidy and a loving husband’s blind confidence.  The end was inevitably tragical.  Lergins was decoyed by the countess to Paris, where she languished like a shark out of water.  The sculptor’s income did not come up to her dreams of luxury, any more than those she inspired in her daughter.  She brought about a separation of the wedded pair and rejoiced when a fresh scandal necessitated a duel between the young Russian and the Frenchman.  Unhappily for her revengeful ideas, it passed over harmlessly enough.

Iza remained the talk and admiration of the gay capital, although women of superior physical attractions rendezvous there.  Nothing blemished her appearance; no excesses, no indulgements, not even bearing a son had a blighting effect.  Unfortunately for the dissevered artist, she had been his model for the most renowned of his works and her name was inseparably intertwined with his own.