governments, of dreaming of being minister, nay, prime-minister, when the day may come in which good, sense is to be challenged and France made bankrupt.  Everybody around him, even his wife, seemed to accept his superiority for something unquestionable.  Their union was not one of those affectionate, faithful, and tender marriages, such as commonplace folk hope to enjoy, but it was a copartnership of two smart people, aided by two bunches of quills.  Each pretended to admire the other with an extravagance of show which made it hard for the bystander to repress doubts and smiles.

Monsieur Jules Sandeau had informed Madame Emile de Girardin that he intended to bring me with him.  I do not know how she found out that I had, in the very heart of the Faubourg Saint Germain, an old aunt, a real duchess, who was recognized as an authority whose dicta could not be disputed by any noble family to be found from the Quai Voltaire to the Rue de Babylone, which, as all the world knows, are the frontiers of that, the most aristocratic quarter of Paris.  Madame de Girardin knew that my aunt was in a position to open to vanity the portals of some noble houses which talents and fame alone could not open.  Now Madame Emile de Girardin’s monomania was to be received in the noble faubourg,—­to live there perfectly at home, as if it were her native sphere,—­to be able to say, “My friend, the little Marchioness,” or, “I have just come from our dear Jeanne’s house, my charming Countess, you know:  she is suffering dreadfully from her neuralgia.”  She reckoned a triumph of this sort a thousand times preferable to the applause of her readers and her friends.  All the dull pleasantries with which she adorned her over-praised “Letters” owed their origin solely to the unequivocal veto placed by two or three courageous noble ladies on the attempts made by Madame Emile de Girardin to force her entrance vi et armis into their mansions.  For my aunt’s sake, she received me with especial courtesy, which I was ingenuous enough to attribute to my own personal merit.  However, I had not time to indulge in analysis:  she was about to begin to read her tragedy.

The tragedy was that “Cleopatre” in which Mademoiselle Rachel appeared, after wrangling for some time with the authoress to induce the latter to give Antony some other name, vowing that Antoine was entirely too vulgar to be uttered on the stage.  The great tragic actress had never heard of the illustrious Roman, and knew no other Antony but the Antoine who scrubbed her floors and brought her water.  It was a woman’s tragedy, but written by a woman in man’s attire, determined to write a very masculine, vigorous work, but succeeding in producing only a plated piece, in which everything was puerile, artificial, and conventional, from the first word to the last line.  It was an olla podrida, in which Shakspeare hobnobbed with Campistron, Theophile Gautier locked arms with Dorat, Plutarch was dovetailed