“It is not I that would rob her of her porter!” Marianne thought, as she walked away from Rue La Fontaine.

Evening was now darkening the gray streets.  A faint bluish mist was rising over the river and spreading like breath over the quays.  Marianne saw Paris in the distance, and her visit seemed like a dream to her; she closed her eyes, and a voice within her whispered confusedly the names of Rosas, Vaudrey, Vanda, Rue Prony; she pictured herself stretched at length on a reclining chair in the luxurious house of a courtesan, and she saw at her feet that man—­a minister—­who supplicatingly besought her favor, while in the distance a man who resembled Rosas was travelling, moving away, disappearing—­

“Nonsense!” the superstitious creature said to herself, “it was one or the other!  The duke or the minister!  I have not made the choice.”

Then looking at the confused image of herself thrown on the window of the cab, she threw a kiss at her own pale reflection, happy with the unbounded joy of a child, and cried aloud while laughing heartily: 

“Bonjour, Vanda!  I greet you, Mademoiselle Vanda.”

PART SECOND

I

The Monceau plain is the quarter of changed fortunes and dice-throwing.  An entire town given over to luxury, born in a single night, suddenly sprung into existence.  The unpremeditated offspring of the aggregation of millions.  Instead of the cobbler’s stall, the red-bedaubed shop of the dealer in wines, the nakedness of an outer boulevard, here in this spot of earth all styles flourish:  the contrast of fancy, the chateau throwing the English cottage in the shade; the Louis XIII. dwelling hobnobbing with the Flemish house; the salamander of Francis I. hugging the bourgeois tenement; the Gothic gateway opening for the entry of the carriages of the courtesan.  A town within a town.  Something novel, white, extravagant, overdone:  the colossal in proximity to the attractive, the vastness of a grand American hotel casting its shadow over an Italian loggia.  It partook at once of the Parisian and the Yankee.  The Chateau de Chambord sheltering a chocolate maker, and the studio of an artist now become the salon of a rich curbstone broker.

The little Hotel de Vanda,—­one of our charming fugitives, as those of the chroniclers who still remember Vanda, say of her in their articles sometimes—­is an elegant establishment, severe in external appearance, but of entirely modern interior arrangements, with a wealth of choice knickknacks, and is regarded as one of the most attractive houses in Rue Prony.  Since the flight of the pretty courtesan, it bears the sad notice:  Residence to let.  Its fast closed shutters give it the gloomy appearance of a deserted boudoir.  Complete silence succeeds feverish bustle!  Vanda was a boisterous, madcap spendthrift.  Through the old