ably bound to become her lover. Hercules is not introduced
into Messalina's home without making some disturbance. Nevertheless
I make bold to add that if there is free entrance to this house,
just as there is in bazaars, you are not exactly compelled to buy
what is for sale. Love and cards are on the programme, but nobody
compels you to take up with either. And the exit is as free as the
entrance."

"She settled down in the Etoile district, a suspicious neighborhood,
three years ago, and opened her drawing-room to that froth of the
continents which comes to Paris to practice its various formidable
and criminal talents."

"I don't remember just how I went to her house. I went as we all go,
because there is card playing, because the women are compliant, and
the men dishonest. I love that social mob of buccaneers with
decorations of all sorts of orders, all titled, and all entirely
unknown at their embassies, except to the spies. They are always
dragging in the subject of honor, quoting the list of their
ancestors on the slightest provocation, and telling the story of
their life at every opportunity, braggarts, liars, sharpers,
dangerous as their cards, false as their names, brave because they
have to be, like the assassins who can not pluck their victims
except by exposing their own lives. In a word, it is the aristocracy
of the bagnio."

"I like them. They are interesting to fathom and to know, amusing to
listen to, often witty, never commonplace as the ordinary French
guests. Their women are always pretty, with a little flavor of
foreign knavery, with the mystery of their past existence, half of
which, perhaps, spent in a House of Correction. They generally have
fine eyes and glorious hair, the true physique of the profession, an
intoxicating grace, a seductiveness which drives men to folly, an
unwholesome, irresistible charm! They conquer like the highwaymen of
old. They are rapacious creatures; true birds of prey. I like them,
too."

"The Marquise Obardi is one of the type of these elegant
good-for-nothings. Ripe and pretty, with a feline charm, you can see
that she is vicious to the marrow. Everybody has a good time at her
house, with cards, dancing, and suppers; in fact there is everything
which goes to make up the pleasures of fashionable society life."

"Have you ever been or are you now her lover?" Leon Saval asked.

"I have not been her lover, I am not now, and I never shall be. I
only go to the house t