with two little rose-diamonds in the handle.

When she went out Madame Soudry carried a parasol of the true
eighteenth-century style; that is to say, a tall cane at the end of
which opened a green sun-shade with a green fringe. When she walked
about the terrace a stranger on the high-road, seeing her from afar,
might have thought her one of Watteau's dames.

In her salon, hung with red damask, with curtains of the same lined with
silk, a fire on the hearth, a mantel-shelf adorned with bibelots of the
good time of Louis XV., and bearing candelabra in the form of lilies
upheld by Cupids--in this salon, filled with furniture in gilded wood of
the "pied de biche" pattern, it is not impossible to understand why the
people of Soulanges called the mistress of the house, "The beautiful
Madame Soulanges." The mansion had actually become the civic pride of
this capital of a canton.

If the leading society of the little town believed in its queen, the
queen as surely believed in herself. By a phenomenon not in the least
rare, which the vanity of mothers and authors carries on at all
moments under our very eyes in behalf of their literary works or their
marriageable daughters, the late Mademoiselle Cochet was, at the end
of seven years, so completely buried under Madame Soudry, the mayoress,
that she not only did not remember her past, but she actually believed
herself a well-bred woman. She had studied the airs and graces, the
dulcet tones, the gestures, the ways of her mistress, so long that when
she found herself in the midst of an opulence of her own she was able to
practice the natural insolence of it. She knew her eighteenth century,
and the tales of its great lords and all their belongings, by heart.
This back-stairs erudition gave to her conversation a flavor of
"oeil-de-boeuf"; her soubrette gossip passed muster for courtly wit.
Morally, the mayoress was, if you wish to say so, tinsel; but to savages
paste diamonds are as good as real ones.

The woman found herself courted and worshipped by the society in which
she lived, just as her mistress had been worshipped in former days. She
gave weekly dinners, with coffee and liqueurs to those who came in after
the dessert. No female head could have resisted the exhilarating
force of such continual adulation. In winter the warm salon, always
well-lighted with wax candles, was well-filled with the richest people
of Soulanges, who paid for the good liqueurs and the fine wines whi