winters, two or three times a week upon him, we shall know more as to his digestion.  Still that dinner was enjoyable.  Beginning with the suspicious salmon, the statesman with the brush-broom head, the one who had overthrown Louis-Philippe without suspecting it, started to explain how, if they had listened to his advice, this constitutional king’s dynasty would yet be upon the throne; and at the moment when the wretched butler poured out his most poisonous wine, the old lady who looked like a dromedary with rings in its ears, made Amedee—­her unfortunate neighbor—­undergo a new oral examination upon the poets of the nineteenth century, and asked him what he thought of Lamartine’s clamorous debts, and Victor Hugo’s foolish pride, and Alfred de Musset’s intemperate habits.

The worthy Amedee is launched!  He will go and pay visits of indigestion; appear one day at Madame such a one’s, and at the houses of several other “Madames.”  At first he will stay there a half-hour, the simpleton! until he sees that the cunning ones only come in and go out exactly as one does in a booth at a fair.  He will see pass before him—­but this time in corsages of velvet or satin-all the necks and shoulders of his acquaintances, those that he turned away from with disgust and those that made him blush.  Each Madame this one, entering Madame that one’s house, will seat herself upon the edge of a chair, and will always say the same inevitable thing, the only thing that can be or should be said that day; for example, “So the poor General is dead!” or “Have you heard the new piece at the Francais?  It is not very strong, but it is well played!” “This will be delicious;” and Amedee will admire, above all things, Madame this one’s play of countenance, when Madame G------tells her that Madame B-------’s daughter is to marry Madame C-----’s nephew.  While she hardly knows these people, she will manifest as lively a joy as if they had announced the death of an old aunt, whose money she is waiting for to renew the furniture in her house.  And, on the contrary, when Madame D---announces that Madame E-----’s little son has the whooping-cough, at once, without transition, by a change of expression that would make the fortune of an actress, the lady of the house puts on an air of consternation, as if the cholera had broken out the night before in the Halles quarter.

Amedee is launched, I repeat it.  He is still a little green and will become the dupe, for a long time, of all the shams, grimaces, acting, and false smiles, which cover so many artificial teeth.  At first sight all is elegance, harmony, and delicacy.  Since Amedee does not know that the Princess Krazinska’s celebrated head of hair was cut from the heads of the Breton girls, how could he suspect that the austere defender of the clergy, M. Lemarguillier, had been gravely compromised in a love affair, and had thrown himself at the feet of the chief of police, exclaiming, “Do not ruin me!” When the king of society