him with
his cynical pleasantries. All the same, one must admit that Paris is
a tremendously great city, for a man to be able to live thus, through
fifteen, twenty years of tricks, artifice, dust thrown in people's eyes,
without everybody finding him out, and for him still to be able to make
a triumphal entry into a drawing-room in the rear of his name announced
loudly and repeatedly, "Monsieur le Marquis de Bois l'Hery."

No, look you, the things that are to be learned at a servants' party,
what a curious spectacle is presented by the fashionable world of Paris,
seen thus from below, from the basements, you need to go to one
before you can realize. Here, for instance, is a little fragment of
conversation which, happening to find myself between M. Francis and M.
Louis, I overheard about the worthy sire de Monpavon.

"You are making a mistake, Francis. You are in funds just now. You
ought to take advantage of the occasion to restore that money to the
Treasury."

"What will you have?" replied M. Francis with a despondent air. "Play is
devouring us."

"Yes, I know it well. But take care. We shall not always be there. We
may die, fall from power. Then you will be asked for accounts by the
people down yonder. And it will be a terrible business."

I had often heard whispered the story of a forced loan of two hundred
thousand francs which the marquis was reputed to have secured from the
State at the time when he was Receiver-General; but the testimony of his
_valet de chambre_ was worse than all. Ah! if masters had any suspicion
of how much servants know, of all the stories that are told in the
servants' hall, if they could see their names dragged among the
sweepings of the house and the refuse of the kitchen, they would never
again dare to say even "shut the door" or "harness the horses." Why, for
instance, take Dr. Jenkins, with the most valuable practice in Paris,
ten years of life in common with a magnificent woman, who is sought
after everywhere; it is in vain that he has done everything to
dissimulate his position, announced his marriage in the newspapers after
the English fashion, admitted to his house only foreign servants knowing
hardly three words of French. In those three words, seasoned with vulgar
oaths and blows of his fist on the table, his coachman Joey, who hates
him, told us his whole history during supper.

"She is going to kick the bucket, his Irish wife, the real one. Remains
to be seen now whether