We knew already of the mission given to Comte Maxime de Trailles,—­a mission he endeavored at first to conceal under some irrigating project.  We even know what you, madame, seem not to know,—­that this able ministerial agent has found means to combine with the cares of electoral politics those of his own private policy.  Monsieur Maxime de Trailles, if we are rightly informed, was on the point of succumbing to the chronic malady with which he has been so long afflicted; I mean debt.  Not debts, for we say “the debt of Monsieur de Trailles,” as we say “the debt of England.”  In this extremity the patient, resolved on heroic remedies, adopted that of marriage, which might perhaps be called marriage in extremis.

To cut a long story short, Monsieur de Trailles was sent to Arcis to put an end to the candidacy of an upstart of the Left centre, a certain Simon Giguet; and having brought forward the mayor of the town as the ministerial candidate, he finds the said mayor, named Beauvisage, possessed of an only daughter, rather pretty, and able to bring her husband five hundred thousand francs amassed in the honorable manufacture of cotton night-caps.  Now you see, I am sure, the mechanism of the affair.

As for our own claims, we certainly do not make cotton night-caps, but we make statues,—­statues for which we are decorated with the Legion of honor; religious statues, inaugurated with great pomp by Monseigneur the bishop of the diocese and all the constituted authorities; statues, or rather a statue, which the whole population of the town has flocked to the Ursuline convent to behold, where Mesdames the nuns, not a little puffed up with this magnificent addition to their bijou of a chapel, have kept their house and their oratory open to all comers for this whole day.  Is not that likely to popularize our candidacy?

This evening, to crown the ceremony of inaugurating our Saint-Ursula, we give in our chateau of Arcis a banquet to fifty guests, among whom we have had the malice to invite (with the chief inhabitants of the place) all the ministerial functionaries and, above all, the ministerial candidate.  But, in view of our own declared candidacy, we feel pretty well assured that the latter will not respond to the invitation.  So much the better! more room for others; and the missing guests, whose names will be made known on the morrow, will be convicted of a servilism which will, we think, injure their influence with the population.

Yesterday we paid a visit at the chateau de Cinq-Cygne, where d’Arthez presented us, in the first place, to the Princesse de Cadignan, who is wonderfully well preserved.  Both she and the old Marquise de Cinq-Cygne received Dorlange—­I should say, Sallenauve—­in the warmest manner.  It was from them that we learned the history of Monsieur Maxime de Trailles’ mission and its present results.  It seems that on his arrival the ministerial agent received some