of causeurs; Count Montalivet, the former minister
of Louis Philippe, and by him, for a few days at the
full of the season, a little old gentleman with a
squeaky voice, M. Adolphe Thiers. Next comes
a group of ladies, the three daughters of the Hispano-Mexican
duchess De Fernan-Nunez; all three looking exactly
alike, tall and dark; all three of a height; all three
invariably dressed in black, with lofty Tyrolese hats
and cocks’ feathers; all three unmarried; all
three marriageable, and worth Croesus only knows how
many millions; all three invariably alone—a
fact which made old Madame Colaredo scream out of her
window one day, “Tiens! voila les trois cent
(sans) gardes!” Then follow Lord Rokeby,
the most affable of lordships; Lord Portarlington;
General Sir William Williams of Kars; Princess Kantacuzene,
the last descendant of the imperial Byzantine house
of that name; the ideally lovely Miss Amy Shaw of
Boston; the three pretty Miss Warrens of New York;
Madame Gavini de Campile, the wife of the prefect,
a fine-looking dame gloriously arrayed in showy robes,
whom half the society adored and the rest cordially
hated; the duke de Mouchy, who married Anna Murat;
the duke de Perigord-Talleyrand, who married an American;
the duke de la Conquista, who derives his title from
the conquest of Peru; the lovely countess Del Borgo;
and the famous Italian beauty, Madame Bellotti, a
Milanese lady, whose maiden name was Visconti, of that
semi-royal house. Theresa Bellotti’s beauty
is of a grand style seen nowhere out of Italy.
Picture her to yourself as I once saw her at a masquerade
at the prefecture. Round her superb figure swept
an ample robe of crimson velvet looped up with bands
of gold. Her bare arms, models worthy of the
chisel of Canova, gleamed from the rich sables which
lined the hanging sleeves of her dress. Her hair,
dark as night, was gathered up in the high fashion
Sir Joshua Reynolds loved to depict. A half-moon
of enormous diamonds fastened a plume over her left
temple, and her neck and fingers flashed back the
colors of the rainbow from a thousand gems. As
to her face, it was radiant. Rich color flushed
her cheeks, her eyes sparkled with animation when
she spoke; but at times, when her features resumed
a calm after conversation, she resembled the portraits
of some of the famous Italian women of the Renaissance—her
own ancestress, for instance, Bianca Visconti, duchess
of Milan, or Veronica Cibo, or Lucrezia Petroni, whose
daughter was the ill-fated Beatrice Cenci. And
now come by the fascinating Mrs. Lloyd, whom all the
world knows and likes; grand-looking Mrs. Senator
Grymes of Louisiana, a witty, brilliant old lady,
whose salon is one of the most elegant in Nice; Baron
Haussmann, and with him his colossal daughter, Madame
de Perneti, the handsomest of giantesses, who was
once asked to join in private theatricals, but when
the stage was built up in her friend’s drawing-room,
being about five feet from the level of the rest of