fellow with the accomplishments of Philip Fogarty, Esq.) of mixing with the elite of French society, and meeting with many of the great, the beautiful, and the brave.  Talleyrand was a frequent guest of the Marquis’s.  His bon-mots used to keep the table in a roar.  Ney frequently took his chop with us; Murat, when in town, constantly dropt in for a cup of tea and friendly round game.  Alas! who would have thought those two gallant heads would be so soon laid low?  My wife has a pair of earrings which the latter, who always wore them, presented to her—­but we are advancing matters.  Anybody could see, “avec un demioeil,” as the Prince of Benevento remarked, how affairs went between me and Blanche; but though she loathed him for his cruelties and the odiousness of his person, the brutal Cambaceres still pursued his designs upon her.

I recollect it was on St. Patrick’s Day.  My lovely friend had procured, from the gardens of the Empress Josephine, at Malmaison (whom we loved a thousand times more than her Austrian successor, a sandy-haired woman, between ourselves, with an odious squint), a quantity of shamrock wherewith to garnish the hotel, and all the Irish in Paris were invited to the national festival.

I and Prince Talleyrand danced a double hornpipe with Pauline Bonaparte and Madame de Stael; Marshal Soult went down a couple of sets with Madame Recamier; and Robespierre’s widow—­an excellent, gentle creature, quite unlike her husband—­stood up with the Austrian ambassador.  Besides, the famous artists Baron Gros, David and Nicholas Poussin, and Canova, who was in town making a statue of the Emperor for Leo X., and, in a word, all the celebrities of Paris—­as my gifted countrywoman, the wild Irish girl, calls them—­were assembled in the Marquis’s elegant receiving-rooms.

At last a great outcry was raised for La Gigue Irlandaise!  La Gigue Irlandaise! a dance which had made a fureur amongst the Parisians ever since the lovely Blanche Sarsfield had danced it.  She stepped forward and took me for a partner, and amidst the bravoes of the crowd, in which stood Ney, Murat, Lannes, the Prince of Wagram, and the Austrian ambassador, we showed to the beau monde of the French capital, I flatter myself, a not unfavorable specimen of the dance of our country.

As I was cutting the double-shuffle, and toe-and-heeling it in the “rail” style, Blanche danced up to me, smiling, and said, “Be on your guard; I see Cambaceres talking to Fouche, the Duke of Otranto, about us; and when Otranto turns his eyes upon a man, they bode him no good.”

“Cambaceres is jealous,” said I.  “I have it,” says she; “I’ll make him dance a turn with me.”  So, presently, as the music was going like mad all this time, I pretended fatigue from my late wounds, and sat down.  The lovely Blanche went up smiling, and brought out Cambaceres as a second partner.

The Marshal is a lusty man, who makes desperate efforts to give himself a waist, and the effect of the exercise upon him was speedily visible.  He puffed and snorted like a walrus, drops trickled down his purple face, while my lovely mischief of a Blanche went on dancing at treble quick, till she fairly danced him down.