The maitre d’hotel here announced that supper was served.  It was remarked that even the coulis de dindonneau made no impression on Bagnigge that night.

II.

The sensation produced by the debut of Amethyst Pimlico at the court of the sovereign, and in the salons of the beau-monde, was such as has seldom been created by the appearance of any other beauty.  The men were raving with love, and the women with jealousy.  Her eyes, her beauty, her wit, her grace, her ton, caused a perfect fureur of admiration or envy.

Introduced by the Duchess of Fitzbattleaxe, along with her Grace’s daughters, the Ladies Gwendoline and Gwinever Portcullis, the heiress’s regal beauty quite flung her cousins’ simple charms into the shade, and blazed with a splendor which caused all “minor lights” to twinkle faintly.  Before a day the beau-monde, before a week even the vulgarians of the rest of the town, rang with the fame of her charms; and while the dandies and the beauties were raving about her, or tearing her to pieces in May Fair, even Mrs. Dobbs (who had been to the pit of the “Hoperer” in a green turban and a crumpled yellow satin) talked about the great HAIRESS to her D. in Bloomsbury Square.

Crowds went to Squab and Lynch’s, in Long Acre, to examine the carriages building for her, so faultless, so splendid, so quiet, so odiously unostentatious and provokingly simple!  Besides the ancestral services of argenterie and vaisselle plate, contained in a hundred and seventy-six plate-chests at Messrs. Childs’, Rumble and Briggs prepared a gold service, and Garraway, of the Haymarket, a service of the Benvenuto Cellini pattern, which were the admiration of all London.  Before a month it is a fact that the wretched haberdashers in the city exhibited the blue stocks, called “Heiress-killers, very chaste, two-and-six:”  long before that, the monde had rushed to Madame Crinoline’s, or sent couriers to Madame Marabou, at Paris, so as to have copies of her dresses; but, as the Mantuan bard observes, “Non cuivis contigit,”—­every foot cannot accommodate itself to the chaussure of Cinderella.

With all this splendor, this worship, this beauty; with these cheers following her, and these crowds at her feet, was Amethyst happy?  Ah, no!  It is not under the necklace the most brilliant that Briggs and Rumble can supply, it is not in Lynch’s best cushioned chariot that the heart is most at ease.  “Que je me ruinerai,” says Fronsac in a letter to Bossuet, “si je savais ou acheter le bonheur!”

With all her riches, with all her splendor, Amethyst was wretched—­wretched, because lonely; wretched, because her loving heart had nothing to cling to.  Her splendid mansion was a convent; no male person even entered it, except Franklin Fox, (who counted for nothing,) and the duchess’s family, her kinsman old Lord Humpington, his friend old Sir John Fogey, and her cousin, the odious, odious Borodino.