e said. Indeed, the marquis
did not lie. After standing through that long and exciting sitting of
the Chamber in the dust of the gallery, his legs ached as if he had spent
two nights in a railway carriage; and as his resolve to die blended with
his longing for a good bath, it occurred to the old sybarite to go to
sleep in a bath-tub like What's-his-name--Thingamy--ps--ps--ps--and
other famous characters of antiquity. It is doing him no more than
justice to say that not one of those Stoics went forth to meet death
more tranquilly than he.

Adorned with a white camellia with which, as he passed, the pretty
flower-girl at the club decorated the buttonhole above his rosette as an
officer of the Legion of Honor, he was walking lightly up Boulevard des
Capucines, when the sight of Madame Jenkins disturbed his serenity for a
moment. He noticed a youthful air about her, a flame in her eyes, a
something so alluring that he stopped to look at her. Tall and lovely,
her long black gauze dress trailing behind, her shoulders covered by a
lace mantle over which a garland of autumn leaves fell from her hat, she
passed on, disappeared amid the throng of other women no less stylish
than she, in a perfumed atmosphere; and the thought that his eyes were
about to close forever on that attractive spectacle, which he enjoyed as
a connoisseur, saddened the old beau a little and diminished the
elasticity of his walk. But a few steps farther on a meeting of another
sort restored all his courage.

A shabby, shamefaced man, dazzled by the bright light, was crossing the
boulevard; it was old Marestang, ex-senator, ex-minister, who was so
deeply compromised in the affair of the _Tourteaux de Malte_, that,
notwithstanding his age, his services, and the great scandal of such a
prosecution, he had been sentenced to two years' imprisonment and
stricken from the rolls of the Legion of Honor, where he was numbered
among the great dignitaries. The affair was already ancient history, and
the poor devil, a portion of his sentence having been remitted, had just
come from prison, dejected, ruined, lacking even the wherewithal to gild
his mental distress, for he had been compelled to disgorge. Standing on
the edge of the sidewalk, he waited, hanging his head, until there
should be an opportunity to cross the crowded street, sorely embarrassed
by that enforced halt on the most frequented corner of the boulevards,
caught between the foot-passengers and the strea