envied box are not members of the club—­“the Club,” par excellence, for thus is it spoken of in Paris.  It is considered quite correct at the club to devote one’s self to the raising of cattle and sheep, as the comtes de Bouville, de Behague, de Hauteserre and others have done with such success, and one may even follow the example of the comte de Falloux, the eloquent Academician, in emblazoning with one’s arms a pen of fat pigs at a competitive show, without in the least derogating from one’s dignity.  One may also sell the wine from one’s vineyards and the iron from one’s furnaces—­for the iron industry is in France looked upon as a sort of heritage of the nobility—­but to get money by any other means than those I have indicated would be considered in the worst possible taste.  On the other hand, it is permitted to any member of the club to lose as much money as he pleases without loss of the respect of his fellows, and the surest way to arrive at this result is to undertake the breeding and running of horses.

As to the external appearance and bearing of the perfect clubman, it is very much that of Disraeli’s hero, “who could hardly be called a dandy or a beau.  There was nothing in his dress, though some mysterious arrangement in his costume—­some rare simplicity, some curious happiness—­always made him distinguished:  there was nothing, however, in his dress, which could account for the influence that he exercised over the manners of his contemporaries;” and it is probably a fact that a member of the club is never noticed by passers on the street on account of anything in his dress or appearance.  In short, the club seems to have adopted for its motto Sancta simplicitas, and the descendants of the old nobility of France, excluded as they practically are to-day from all public employment save that of the army, seem determined to live amongst themselves, in tranquillity and retirement, in such a way as to attract the least possible notice from the press or from the crowd.  Their portraits never find their way into the illustrated papers, and no penny-a-liner ventures to make them the subject of a biographical sketch:  indeed, any one rash enough to seek to tread upon this forbidden ground would find himself met at the threshold by a dignified but very decided refusal of all information and material necessary to his undertaking.

As an illustration of the care taken by the ruling spirits of the club to preserve the attitude which they have assumed toward the public, it may be worth mentioning that Isabelle, who for a long time enjoyed the distinction of serving the club as its accredited flower-girl, and who in that capacity used to hold herself in readiness every evening in her velvet tub at the foot of the staircase of the splendid apartments at the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue Scribe—­the present location of the club—­was dismissed for no other reason than that she had become too extensively known to the gay world of Paris.  Excluded from the sacred paddock on the race-course, she is to-day compelled to content herself on great occasions with selling her flowers on the public turf from a pretty basket-wagon drawn by a pair of coquettish black ponies, or “toy” ponies in the language of the day.