knowledge to become, by degrees, his smoking, fencing, and harness room.  Pipes and weapons of all shapes and all lands, saddles, hunting-whips, spurs, bits of many patterns, foils and boxing-gloves formed a queer and heterogenous collection.  However, by thus surrounding his daily life with the objects of his favorite studies, the colonel proved himself a man who possessed the courage of his opinions.  In fact, he openly said that, beyond a passing notice, there was no reading worth a man’s attention except the “Stud Journal.”

It is to be supposed, however, that politics had managed in some way to slip into this existence devoted to muscular exercise and the hippic science, for, from a heap of the morning journals disdainfully flung upon the floor by the worthy colonel, Monsieur de Trailles picked up a copy of the legitimist organ, in which he read, under the heading of ELECTIONS, the following article: 

The staff of the National Guard and the Jockey Club, which had various representatives in the last Chamber, have just sent one of their shining notabilities to the one about to open.  Colonel Franchessini, so well known for his ardor in punishing the refractories of the National Guard, has been elected almost unanimously in one of the rotten boroughs of the civil list.  It is supposed that he will take his seat beside the phalanx of other henchmen, and show himself in the Chamber, as he has elsewhere, one of the firmest supporters of the policy of the present order of things.

As Maxime finished reading the article, the colonel entered.

After serving the Empire for a very short time, Colonel Franchessini had become one of the most brilliant colonels of the Restoration; but in consequence of certain mists which had risen about the perfect honorableness of his character he had found himself obliged to send in his resignation, so that in 1830 he was fully prepared to devote himself in the most ardent manner to the dynasty of July.  He did not re-enter military service, because, shortly after his misadventure he had met with an Englishwoman, enormously rich, who being taken with his beauty, worthy at that time of the Antinous, had made him her husband, and the colonel henceforth contented himself with the epaulets of the staff of the National Guard.  He became, in that position, one of the most exacting and turbulent of blusterers, and through the influence of that quality combined with the fortune his wife had given him, he had just been elected, as the paper stated, to the Chamber of deputies.  Approaching the fifties, like his friend de Trailles, Colonel Franchessini had still some pretensions to the after-glow of youth, which his slim figure and agile military bearing seemed likely to preserve to him for some time longer.  Although he had conquered the difficulty of his gray hair, reducing its silvery reflections by keeping it cut very close, he was less resigned to the scantiness