f Paris, so full
of chords and melody! Listen to it sometimes, monsieur, and you will
hear a symphony!"

[Illustration: "LA FILLE DE LA BLANCHISSEUSE"
By Bellanger.--Estampe Moderne]

And Mademoiselle Fanny will tell you of the famous men she has known for
years, and how she has found the most celebrated of them simple in their
tastes, and free from ostentation--"in fact it is always so, is it not,
with les hommes celebres? C'est toujours comme ca, monsieur, toujours!"
and mentions one who has grown gray in the service of art and can count
his decorations from half a dozen governments. Madame will wax
enthusiastic--her face wreathed in smiles. "Ah! he is a bon garcon; he
always eats with the rest, for three or four francs, never more! He is
so amiable, and, you know, he is very celebrated and very rich"; and
madame will not only tell you his entire history, but about his
work--the beauty of his wife and how "aimables" his children are.
Mademoiselle Fanny knows them all.

But the men who come here to lunch are not idlers; they come in, many of
them, fresh from a hard morning's work in the studio. The tall sculptor
opposite you has been at work, since his morning coffee, on a group for
the government; another, bare-armed and in his flannel shirt, has been
building up masses of clay, punching and modeling, and scraping away,
all the morning, until he produces, in the rough, the body of a
giantess, a huge caryatide that is destined, for the rest of her
existence, to hold upon her broad shoulders part of the facade of an
American building. The "giantess" in the flesh is lunching with him--a
Juno-like woman of perhaps twenty-five, with a superb head well poised,
her figure firm and erect. You will find her exceedingly interesting,
quiet, and refined, and with a knowledge of things in general that will
surprise you, until you discover she has, in her life as a model, been
thrown daily in conversation with men of genius, and has acquired a
smattering of the knowledge of many things--of art and literature--of
the theater and its playwrights--plunging now and then into medicine and
law and poetry--all these things she has picked up in the studios, in
the cafes, in the course of her Bohemian life. This "vernis," as the
French call it, one finds constantly among the women here, for their
days are passed among men of intelligence and ability, whose lives and
energy are surrounded and encouraged by an atmosphere of art.

In an h