sight of Vaudrey standing within the range of
her opera-glasses, she was seized with the eager desire to make him an
habitue of her salon, the new salon that had just been launched. Madame
Marsy was bitten by that tarantula whose bite makes modern society move
as if afflicted with Saint Vitus's dance. A widow, rich and still
young, very much admired, she had set herself to play the role of a
leader in society to pass away the time. She was one of those women
forever passing before the reporters' note-book, as others pass in front
of a photographic apparatus. Of her inner life, however, very little was
known to the public. But the exact shade of her hair, the color of her
eyes, the cut of her gowns, the address of her tradesmen, the _menu_ of
her dinners, the programme of her concerts, the names of her guests, the
visitors to her salon, the address of her mansion, were all familiar to
every one, and Madame Marsy was daily reported by the chroniclers to the
letter, painted, dressed and undressed.

There was some romantic gossip whispered about her. It was said that she
had formerly led Philippe Marsy, the artist, a _hard life_. This artist
was the painter of _Charity_, the picture so much admired at the
Luxembourg, where it hangs between a Nymph by Henner and a Portrait of a
Lady by Carolus Duran. She was pretty, free, and sufficiently rich since
the sale of the contents of Philippe Marsy's studio. His slightest
sketches had fetched enormous sums under Monsieur Pillet's hammer at the
Hotel Drouot, and Sabine after an appropriate interval of mourning,
opened her salon.

Solitary, though surrounded by friends, she created no jealousy among
her admirers, whose homage she received with perfect equanimity, as if
become weary and desirous of a court but not of a favorite. She had a
son at college who was growing up; he, however, was rarely to be met
with in his mother's little hotel in the Boulevard Malesherbes. This
pale, slender youth in his student's uniform would sometimes steal
furtively up the staircase to pay his mother a visit as a stranger might
have done, never staying long, however, but hurrying off again to rejoin
an old woman who waited at the corner of the street and who would take
him by the arm and walk away with him--Madame Marsy, his grandmother.

It was the grandmother who was bringing up the boy. She and a
kind-hearted fellow, Francois Charriere, a sculptor, who as he said
himself, was nothing of a genius,