exploits and
to exalt him into a sort of rivalship of Monte Cristo. He assiduously
attended the theaters and salons, receiving homage everywhere-even from
the emperor himself. Finally he mounted the rostrum, and his lectures on
_L'Amour_ were the talk of the gay city.

Among those who had rushed to listen to the Baron's impassioned
eloquence was Helene Cecille Stille, now the proprietress of the
handsomest hotel on the Rue Mont-martre. It need scarcely be premised
that the wandering and appreciative eyes of the lecturer had rested on
the beautiful American, as she sat before him in an attitude expressive
of dormant passion, tinged with an imperious coquetry which was one of
the most alluring of her charms. The Hotel Montmartre was then the
fashionable resort of Louis Napoleon's dissolute nobility, and the Baron
de Reviere soon found himself a worshiper in the luxurious retreat. He
was not a man who courted by halves. He fell madly in love with the
voluptuous Helene, and yielding to an irresistible penchant, the soiled
beauty threw herself and her accumulated francs into his arms.

The Baron was one of those few men whose manners were perfect and whose
dress never strikes the eye, but which seems to have developed on them
as the natural foliage of their persons. He had a high appreciation of
the enjoyments of life--vanity, ostentation, good eating, and even the
austere joys of the family. At home with his wife he illustrated the
tender assiduity of the young husband; abroad he was the personification
of a youth just freed from parental discipline. While his wife was the
happiest woman in Paris, he was rendering Miss Stille equally
felicitous. The dinners he gave at home were unexcelled except by those
banquets which he gave at the hotel in the Rue Montmartre.

So complete had become the Baron's infatuation with the fair Helene in
September, that he took her to Biarritz, and, according to her own
story, introduced her to the Emperor Napoleon. "Then," to use her own
language when examined under oath, "I came back to Paris; stayed there
about a week, and then went to London with de Reviere. After spending
ten days in London, we went back to Paris and stopped at the Hotel de
Louvre. We then went to Bordeaux, where I remained a few days, and
whence I went to Lisbon, Portugal, staying six weeks, and went back to
Paris by way of Marseilles, traveling part of the distance in the yacht
of the Bey of Tunis. From Paris, I went wi