The apartments are flooded with a mellow light from paraffine candles in solid silver candelabra.

The company is the most aristocratic and wealthy in Paris.

Three or four brass bands are playing behind a portiere between the coal shed, and also behind time.  Footmen in gay-laced livery bring in beer noiselessly and carry out apple-peelings dropped by the guests.

Valerie, seventh Duchess du Bellairs, leans back on a solid gold ottoman on eiderdown cushions, surrounded by the wittiest, the bravest, and the handsomest courtiers in the capital.

“Ah, madame,” said the Prince Champvilliers, of Palais Royale, corner of Seventy-third Street, “as Montesquiaux says, ’Rien de plus bon tutti frutti’—­Youth seems your inheritance.  You are to-night the most beautiful, the wittiest in your own salon.  I can scarce believe my own senses, when I remember that thirty-one years ago you—­”

“Saw it off!” says the Duchess peremptorily.

The Prince bows low, and drawing a jewelled dagger, stabs himself to the heart.

“The displeasure of your grace is worse than death,” he says, as he takes his overcoat and hat from a corner of the mantelpiece and leaves the room.

“Voila,” says Beebe Francillon, fanning herself languidly.  “That is the way with men.  Flatter them, and they kiss your hand.  Loose but a moment the silken leash that holds them captive through their vanity and self-opinionativeness, and the son-of-a-gun gets on his ear at once.  The devil go with him, I say.”

“Ah, mon Princesse,” sighs the Count Pumpernickel, stooping and whispering with eloquent eyes into her ear.  “You are too hard upon us.  Balzac says, ’All women are not to themselves what no one else is to another.’  Do you not agree with him?”

“Cheese it!” says the Princess.  “Philosophy palls upon me.  I’ll shake you.”

“Hosses?” says the Count.

Arm and arm they go out to the salon au Beurre.

Armande de Fleury, the young pianissimo danseuse from the Folies Bergere is about to sing.

She slightly clears her throat and lays a voluptuous cud of chewing gum upon the piano as the first notes of the accompaniment ring through the salon.

As she prepares to sing, the Duchess du Bellairs grasps the arm of her ottoman in a vice-like grip, and she watches with an expression of almost anguished suspense.

She scarcely breathes.

Then, as Armande de Fleury, before uttering a note, reels, wavers, turns white as snow and falls dead upon the floor, the Duchess breathes a sigh of relief.

The Duchess had poisoned her.

Then the guests crowd about the piano, gazing with bated breath, and shuddering as they look upon the music rack and observe that the song that Armande came so near singing is “Sweet Marie.”

Twenty minutes later a dark and muffled figure was seen to emerge from a recess in the mullioned wall of the Arc de Triomphe and pass rapidly northward.