The first empire, the restoration, the monarchy of July, the second republic, the second empire, have passed beneath her windows, but she has not taken the trouble to open them.  All that has happened since ’89 she considers as never having been.  For her it is a nightmare from which she is still awaiting a release.  She has looked at everything, but then she looks through her own pretty glasses which show her everything as she would wish it, and which are to be obtained of dealers in illusions.

Though over sixty-eight years old she is as straight as a poplar, and has never been ill.  She is vivacious, and active to excess, and can only keep still when asleep, or when playing her favorite game of piquet.  She has her four meals a day, eats like a vintager, and takes her wine neat.  She professes an undisguised contempt for the silly women of our century who live for a week on a partridge, and inundate with water grand sentiments which they entangle in long phrases.  She has always been, and still is, very positive, and her word is prompt and easily understood.  She never shrinks from using the most appropriate word to express her meaning.  So much the worse, if some delicate ears object!  She heartily detests hypocrisy.

She believes in God, but she believes also in M. de Voltaire, so that her devotion is, to say the least, problematical.  However, she is on good terms with the curate of her parish, and is very particular about the arrangement of her dinner on the days she honours him with an invitation to her table.  She seems to consider him a subaltern, very useful to her salvation, and capable of opening the gate of paradise for her.

Such as she is, she is shunned like the plague.  Everybody dreads her loud voice, her terrible indiscretion, and the frankness of speech which she affects, in order to have the right of saying the most unpleasant things which pass through her head.  Of all her family, there only remains her granddaughter, whose father died very young.

Of a fortune originally large, and partly restored by the indemnity allowed by the government, but since administered in the most careless manner, she has only been able to preserve an income of twenty thousand francs, which diminishes day by day.  She is, also, proprietor of the pretty little house which she inhabits, situated near the Invalides, between a rather narrow court-yard, and a very extensive garden.

So circumstanced, she considers herself the most unfortunate of God’s creatures, and passes the greater part of her life complaining of her poverty.  From time to time, especially after some exceptionally bad speculation, she confesses that what she fears most is to die in a pauper’s bed.

A friend of M. Daburon’s presented him one evening to the Marchioness d’Arlange, having dragged him to her house in a mirthful mood, saying, “Come with me, and I will show you a phenomenon, a ghost of the past in flesh and bone.”