“Your caleche is there in the yard; behind it is a landau for the children; and behind the landau is an omnibus for the servants.  The three carriages bear your monogram, are driven by your coachman, and drawn by your horses.  Your address is 24 Rue Murillo, and here is the menu of your dinner to-night.  You invited me two months ago; I accept, and will even take the liberty of bringing a dozen friends with me.  I shall furnish everything, even the guests.  But do not be alarmed; you know them all; they are mutual friends, and this evening we shall be able to judge of the merits of your cook.”

The first Parisian who had the honor and pleasure of paying homage to the beauty of Mrs. Scott and Miss Percival was a little Marmiton fifteen years old, who stood there in his white clothes, his wicker basket on his head, at the moment when Mrs. Scott’s carriage, entangled in the multitude of vehicles, slowly worked its way out of the station.  The little cook stopped short on the pavement, opened wide his eyes, looked at the two sisters with amazement, and boldly cast full in their faces the single word: 

“Mazette!”

When Madame Recamier saw her first wrinkles, and first gray hairs, she said to a friend: 

“Ah! my dear, there are no more illusions left for me!  From the day when I saw that the little chimney-sweeps no longer turned round in the street to look at me, I understood that all was over.”

The opinion of the confectioners’ boys is, in similar cases, of equal value with the opinion of the little chimney-sweeps.  All was not over for Susie and Bettina; on the contrary, all was only beginning.

Five minutes later, Mrs. Scott’s carriage was ascending the Boulevard Haussmann to the slow and measured trot of a pair of admirable horses.  Paris counted two Parisians the more.

The success of Mrs. Scott and Miss Percival was immediate, decisive, like a flash of lightning.  The beauties of Paris are not classed and catalogued like the beauties of London; they do not publish their portraits in the illustrated papers, or allow their photographs to be sold at the stationers.  However, there is always a little staff, consisting of a score of women, who represent the grace, and charm, and beauty of Paris, which women, after ten or twelve years’ service, pass into the reserve, just like the old generals.  Susie and Bettina immediately became part of this little staff.  It was an affair of four-and-twenty hours—­of less than four-and-twenty hours, for all passed between eight in the morning and midnight, the day after their arrival in Paris.

Imagine a sort of little ‘feerie’, in three acts, of which the success increases from tableau to tableau: 

1st.  A ride at ten in the morning in the Bois, with the two marvellous grooms imported from America.

2d.  A walk at six o’clock in the Allee des Acacias.

3d.  An appearance at the opera at ten in the evening in Mrs. Norton’s box.