Florentine happened that night to have a friend with her,—­a certain Marie Godeschal, beautiful as an angel, cold as a danseuse, and a pupil of Vestris, who foretold for her a great choregraphic destiny.  Mademoiselle Godeschal, anxious to make her first appearance at the Panorama-Dramatique under the name of Mariette, based her hopes on the protection and influence of a first gentleman of the bedchamber, to whom Vestris had promised to introduce her.  Vestris, still green himself at this period, did not think his pupil sufficiently trained to risk the introduction.  The ambitious girl did, in the end, make her pseudonym of Mariette famous; and the motive of her ambition, it must be said, was praiseworthy.  She had a brother, a clerk in Derville’s law office.  Left orphans and very poor, and devoted to each other, the brother and sister had seen life such as it is in Paris.  The one wished to be a lawyer that he might support his sister, and he lived on ten sous a day; the other had coldly resolved to be a dancer, and to profit by her beauty as much as by her legs that she might buy a practice for her brother.  Outside of their feeling for each other, and of their mutual life and interests, everything was to them, as it once was to the Romans and the Hebrews, barbaric, outlandish, and hostile.  This generous affection, which nothing ever lessened, explained Mariette to those who knew her intimately.

The brother and sister were living at this time on the eighth floor of a house in the Vieille rue du Temple.  Mariette had begun her studies when she was ten years old; she was now just sixteen.  Alas! for want of becoming clothes, her beauty, hidden under a coarse shawl, dressed in calico, and ill-kept, could only be guessed by those Parisians who devote themselves to hunting grisettes and the quest of beauty in misfortune, as she trotted past them with mincing step, mounted on iron pattens.  Philippe fell in love with Mariette.  To Mariette, Philippe was commander of the dragoons of the Guard, a staff-officer of the Emperor, a young man of twenty-seven, and above all, the means of proving herself superior to Florentine by the evident superiority of Philippe over Giroudeau.  Florentine and Giroudeau, the one to promote his comrade’s happiness, the other to get a protector for her friend, pushed Philippe and Mariette into a “mariage en detrempe,”—­a Parisian term which is equivalent to “morganatic marriage,” as applied to royal personages.  Philippe when they left the house revealed his poverty to Giroudeau, but the old roue reassured him.

“I’ll speak to my nephew Finot,” he said.  “You see, Philippe, the reign of phrases and quill-drivers is upon us; we may as well submit.  To-day, scribblers are paramount.  Ink has ousted gunpowder, and talk takes the place of shot.  After all, these little toads of editors are pretty good fellows, and very clever.  Come and see me to-morrow at the newspaper office; by that time I shall have said a word for you to my nephew.