sustained a superb cap with knots of cherry satin ribbon matching those on her dress.  If you will kindly imagine beneath this ultra-coquettish cap the face of a monkey of extreme ugliness, on which a flat nose, fleshless as that of Death, is separated by a strong hairy line from a mouth filled with false teeth, whence issue sounds like the confused clacking of hunting-horns, you will have some difficulty in understanding why the leading society of Soulanges (all the town, in fact) thought this quasi-queen a beauty,—­unless, indeed, you remember the succinct statement recently made “ex professo,” by one of the cleverest women of our time, on the art of making her sex beautiful by surrounding accessories.

As to accessories, in the first place, Madame Soudry was surrounded by the magnificent gifts accumulated by her late mistress, which the ex-Benedictine called “fructus belli.”  Then she made the most of her ugliness by exaggerating it, and by assuming that indescribable air and manner which belongs only to Parisian women, the secret of which is known even to the most vulgar among them,—­who are always more or less mimics.  She laced tight, wore an enormous bustle, also diamond earrings, and her fingers were covered with rings.  At the top of her corsage, between two mounds of flesh well plastered with pearl-white, shone a beetle made of topaz with a diamond head, the gift of dear mistress,—­a jewel renowned throughout the department.  Like the late dear mistress, she wore short sleeves and bare arms, and flirted an ivory fan, painted by Boucher with two little rose-diamonds in the handle.

When she went out Madame Soudry carried a parasol of the true eighteenth-century style; that is to say, a tall cane at the end of which opened a green sun-shade with a green fringe.  When she walked about the terrace a stranger on the high-road, seeing her from afar, might have thought her one of Watteau’s dames.

In her salon, hung with red damask, with curtains of the same lined with silk, a fire on the hearth, a mantel-shelf adorned with bibelots of the good time of Louis XV., and bearing candelabra in the form of lilies upheld by Cupids—­in this salon, filled with furniture in gilded wood of the “pied de biche” pattern, it is not impossible to understand why the people of Soulanges called the mistress of the house, “The beautiful Madame Soulanges.”  The mansion had actually become the civic pride of this capital of a canton.

If the leading society of the little town believed in its queen, the queen as surely believed in herself.  By a phenomenon not in the least rare, which the vanity of mothers and authors carries on at all moments under our very eyes in behalf of their literary works or their marriageable daughters, the late Mademoiselle Cochet was, at the end of seven years, so completely buried under Madame Soudry, the mayoress, that she not only did not remember her past, but she actually believed herself a well-bred woman.  She had studied