It was written that on this day no pain or unpleasantness should be spared to Madame de l’Estorade.  Just before the sitting began, the Marquise d’Espard, accompanied by Monsieur de Ronquerolles, entered the peers’ gallery and took her seat beside the countess.  Though meeting constantly in society, the two women could not endure each other.  Madame de l’Estorade despised the spirit of intrigue, the total lack of principle, and the sour, malevolent nature which the marquise covered with an elegant exterior; and the marquise despised, to a still greater degree, what she called the pot-au-feu virtues of Madame de l’Estorade.  It must also be mentioned that Madame de l’Estorade was thirty-two years old and her beauty was still undimmed, whereas Madame d’Espard was forty-four, and, in spite of the careful dissimulations of the toilet, her beauty was fairly at an end.

“You do not often come here, I think,” said Madame d’Espard, after the usual conventional phrases about the pleasure of their meeting had passed.

“I never come,” replied Madame de l’Estorade.

“And I am most assiduous,” said Madame d’Espard.

Then, pretending to a sudden recollection, she added,—­

“Ah!  I forgot; you have a special interest, I think, on this occasion.  A friend of yours is to be judged, is he not?”

“Yes; Monsieur de Sallenauve has been to our house several times.”

“How sad it is,” said the marquise, “to see a man who, Monsieur de Ronquerolles tells me, had the making of a hero in many ways, come down to the level of the correctional police.”

“His crime so far,” said Madame de l’Estorade, dryly, “consists solely in his absence.”

“At any rate,” continued the marquise, “he seems to be a man eaten up by ambition.  Before his parliamentary attempt, he made, as you doubtless know, a matrimonial attempt upon the Lantys, which ended in the beautiful heiress of that family, into whose good graces he had insinuated himself, being sent to a convent.”

Madame de l’Estorade was not much surprised at finding that this history, which Sallenauve had told her as very secret, had reached the knowledge of Madame d’Espard.  The marquise was one of the best informed women in Paris; her salon, as an old academician had said mythologically, was the Temple of Fame.

“I think the sitting is about to begin,” said Madame de l’Estorade; fearing some blow from the claws of the marquise, she was eager to put an end to the conversation.

The president had rung his bell, the deputies were taking their seats, the curtain was about to rise.  As a faithful narrator of the session we desire our readers to attend, we think it safer and better in every way to copy verbatim the report of the debate as given in one of the morning papers of the following day.

Chamber of Deputies.

  In the chair, M. Cointet (vice-president).