“Who’ll take the flure with me?” said the charming girl, animated by the sport.

“Faix, den, ’tis I, Lanty Clancy!” cried my rascal, who had been mad with excitement at the scene; and, stepping in with a whoop and a hurroo, he began to dance with such rapidity as made all present stare.

As the couple were footing it, there was a noise as of a rapid cavalcade traversing the Place Vendome, and stopping at the Marquis’s door.  A crowd appeared to mount the stair; the great doors of the reception-room were flung open, and two pages announced their Majesties the Emperor and the Empress.  So engaged were Lanty and Blanche, that they never heard the tumult occasioned by the august approach.

It was indeed the Emperor, who, returning from the Theatre Francais, and seeing the Marquis’s windows lighted up, proposed to the Empress to drop in on the party.  He made signs to the musicians to continue:  and the conqueror of Marengo and Friedland watched with interest the simple evolutions of two happy Irish people.  Even the Empress smiled and, seeing this, all the courtiers, including Naples and Talleyrand, were delighted.

“Is not this a great day for Ireland?” said the Marquis, with a tear trickling down his noble face.  “O Ireland!  O my country!  But no more of that.  Go up, Phil, you divvle, and offer her Majesty the choice of punch or negus.”

Among the young fellows with whom I was most intimate in Paris was Eugene Beauharnais, the son of the ill-used and unhappy Josephine by her former marriage with a French gentleman of good family.  Having a smack of the old blood in him, Eugene’s manners were much more refined than those of the new-fangled dignitaries of the Emperor’s Court, where (for my knife and fork were regularly laid at the Tuileries) I have seen my poor friend Murat repeatedly mistake a fork for a toothpick, and the gallant Massena devour pease by means of his knife, in a way more innocent than graceful.  Talleyrand, Eugene, and I used often to laugh at these eccentricities of our brave friends; who certainly did not shine in the drawing-room, however brilliant they were in the field of battle.  The Emperor always asked me to take wine with him, and was full of kindness and attention.

“I like Eugene,” he would say, pinching my ear confidentially, as his way was—­“I like Eugene to keep company with such young fellows as you; you have manners; you have principles; my rogues from the camp have none.  And I like you, Philip my boy,” he added, “for being so attentive to my poor wife—­the Empress Josephine, I mean.”  All these honors made my friends at the Marquis’s very proud, and my enemies at Court crever with envy.  Among these, the atrocious Cambaceres was not the least active and envenomed.