ich Hemerlingue's life and his associations were located. Levantine
society, which is quite numerous in Paris, consisting principally of
German Jews, bankers or commission merchants, who, after making enormous
fortunes in the Orient, continue in business here in order not to lose
the habit of it, was very regular in its attendance on the baroness's
days. Tunisians sojourning in Paris never failed to call upon the wife
of the great banker, who was in favor at home, and old Colonel Brahim,
the bey's charge d'affaires, with his drooping lips and his lustreless
eyes, took his nap every Saturday in the corner of the same divan.

"Your salon smells of burning flesh, my goddaughter," the old Princesse
de Dions said laughingly to the newly-christened Marie, whom she and
Maitre Le Merquier had held at the baptismal font; but the presence of
that crowd of heretics, Jews, Mussulmans and even renegades, those fat
women with pimply faces, gaudily dressed, loaded down with gold and
earrings, "veritable bales" of finery, did not prevent Faubourg
Saint-Germain from calling upon, surrounding and watching over the young
neophyte, the plaything of those noble dames, a very pliant, very docile
doll, whom they took about and exhibited, quoting her _naive_
evangelical remarks, especially interesting by way of contrast to her
past. Perhaps there found its way into the hearts of those amiable
patronesses the hope of encountering in that company fresh from the
Orient an opportunity to make a new conversion, to fill the aristocratic
mission chapel once more with the touching spectacle of one of those
baptisms of adults, which carry you back to the early days of the faith,
to the banks of the Jordan, and are soon followed by the first
communion, the rebaptizing, the confirmation, all affording pretexts for
the godmother to accompany her goddaughter, to guide that young soul, to
look on at the ingenuous transports of a new-born faith, and at the same
time to display costumes deftly varied and shaded to suit the brilliancy
or the solemnity of the ceremony. But it does not often happen that a
baron prominent in financial circles brings to Paris an Armenian slave
whom he has made his lawful wife.

A slave! That was the stain in the past of that woman of the Orient,
purchased long ago in the slave-mart at Adrianople for the Emperor of
Morocco, then, upon the Emperor's death and the dispersion of his harem,
sold to the young Bey Ahmed. Hemerlingue had