ss
d'Arlange. The surprise was as great as it was natural.

This dear marchioness was, or rather is,--for she is still in the land
of the living,--a personage whom one would consider rather out of date.
She is surely the most singular legacy bequeathed us by the eighteenth
century. How, and by what marvellous process she had been preserved
such as we see her, it is impossible to say. Listening to her, you would
swear that she was yesterday at one of those parties given by the queen
where cards and high stakes were the rule, much to the annoyance of
Louis XIV., and where the great ladies cheated openly in emulation of
each other.

Manners, language, habits, almost costume, she has preserved everything
belonging to that period about which authors have written only to
display the defects. Her appearance alone will tell more than an
exhaustive article, and an hour's conversation with her, more than a
volume.

She was born in a little principality, where her parents had taken
refuge whilst awaiting the chastisements and repentance of an erring and
rebellious people. She had been brought up amongst the old nobles of
the emigration, in some very ancient and very gilded apartment, just as
though she had been in a cabinet of curiosities. Her mind had awakened
amid the hum of antediluvian conversations, her imagination had first
been aroused by arguments a little less profitable than those of an
assembly of deaf persons convoked to decide upon the merits of the work
of some distinguished musician. Here she imbibed a fund of ideas, which,
applied to the forms of society of to-day, are as grotesque as would
be those of a child shut up until twenty years of age in an Assyrian
museum.

The first empire, the restoration, the monarchy of July, the second
republic, the second empire, have passed beneath her windows, but she
has not taken the trouble to open them. All that has happened since '89
she considers as never having been. For her it is a nightmare from which
she is still awaiting a release. She has looked at everything, but then
she looks through her own pretty glasses which show her everything as
she would wish it, and which are to be obtained of dealers in illusions.

Though over sixty-eight years old she is as straight as a poplar, and
has never been ill. She is vivacious, and active to excess, and can only
keep still when asleep, or when playing her favorite game of piquet. She
has her four meals a day, eats like a vin