hung--when she ripens, and mellows,
and rots away into painted, blazing, staring, wholesale harlotry--when,
in her turn, she ruins warm youth with false smiles and long bills--and
when worse--worse than all--when she has children, daughters perhaps,
brought up to the same trade, cooped, plumper, for some hoary lecher,
without a heart in their bosoms, unless a balance for weighing money may
be called a heart. Mary became this; and I wish to Heaven she had rather
died in an hospital! Her lover polluted her soul as well as her beauty:
he found her another lover when he was tired of her. When she was at the
age of thirty-six I met her in Paris, with a daughter of sixteen. I was
then flush with money, frequenting salons, and playing the part of
a fine gentleman. She did not know me at first; and she sought my
acquaintance. For you must know, my young friend," said Gawtrey,
abruptly breaking off the thread of his narrative, "that I am not
altogether the low dog you might suppose in seeing me here. At
Paris--ah! you don't know Paris--there is a glorious ferment in society
in which the dregs are often uppermost! I came here at the Peace, and
here have I resided the greater part of each year ever since. The vast
masses of energy and life, broken up by the great thaw of the Imperial
system, floating along the tide, are terrible icebergs for the vessel
of the state. Some think Napoleonism over--its effects are only begun.
Society is shattered from one end to the other, and I laugh at the
little rivets by which they think to keep it together.

[This passage was written at a period when the dynasty of Louis
Philippe seemed the most assured, and Napoleonism was indeed
considered extinct.]

"But to return. Paris, I say, is the atmosphere for adventurers--new
faces and new men are so common here that they excite no impertinent
inquiry, it is so usual to see fortunes made in a day and spent in a
month; except in certain circles, there is no walking round a man's
character to spy out where it wants piercing! Some lean Greek poet
put lead in his pockets to prevent being blown away;--put gold in your
pockets, and at Paris you may defy the sharpest wind in the world,--yea,
even the breath of that old AEolus--Scandal! Well, then, I had money--no
matter how I came by it--and health, and gaiety; and I was well received
in the coteries that exist in all capitals, but mostly in France, where
pleasure is the cement that joins many disc