that we should cut each other's
throats before breakfast to-morrow? Bourgeois! why not grocer? I am an
artist--don't you know that by this time?"

"Don't get angry, my dear fellow; I meant to say that in certain places
the title of a Vicomte has still a more powerful attraction than you,
with your artistic but plebeian ideas, would suppose in this year of our
Lord 1832."

"Well and good. I accept your apology."

"A vicomte's title is a recommendation in the eyes of people who still
cling to the baubles of nobility, and all women are of this class. There
is something, I know not what, delicate and knightly in this title,
which suits a youngish bachelor. Duke above all titles is the one that
sounds the best. Moliere and Regnard have done great harm to the title
of marquis. Count is terribly bourgeois, thanks to the senators of the
empire. As to a Baron, unless he is called Montmorency or Beaufremont,
it is the lowest grade of nobility; vicomte, on the contrary, is above
reproach; it exhales a mixed odor of the old regime and young France;
then, don't you know, our Chateaubriand was a vicomte.

"I departed from my subject in speaking of nobility. I accidentally
turned over one day to the article upon my family in the Dictionnaire de
Saint-Allais; I found that one of my ancestors, Christophe de Gerfaut,
married, in 1569, a Mademoiselle Yolande de Corandeuil.

"'O my ancestor! O my ancestress!' I exclaimed, 'you had strange
baptismal names; but no matter, I thank you. You are going to serve
me as a grappling iron; I shall be very unskilful if at the very first
meeting the old aunt escapes Christophe.'

"A few days later I went to the Marquise de Chameillan's, one of
the most exclusive houses in the noble Faubourg. When I enter her
drawing-room, I usually cause the same sensation that Beelzebub would
doubtless produce should he put his foot into one of the drawing-rooms
in Paradise. That evening, when I was announced, I saw a certain
undulation of heads in a group of young women who were whispering to
one another; many curious eyes were fastened upon me, and among these
beautiful eyes were two more beautiful than all the others: they were
those of my bewitching traveller.

"I exchanged a rapid glance with her, one only; after paying my respects
to the mistress of the house, I mingled with a crowd of men, and
entered into conversation with an old peer upon some political question,
avoiding to look again toward Madame