ustic philosophy produced by _satiety_. In the
life she led, neither her heart nor her head was engaged; the faculties
of both were irritated, not satisfied or employed. She felt somewhat too
sensitively the hollowness of the great world, and had a low opinion
of human nature. In fact, she was a woman of the French memoirs--one of
those charming and _spirituelles_ Aspasias of the boudoir, who
interest us by their subtlety, tact, and grace, their exquisite tone of
refinement, and are redeemed from the superficial and frivolous, partly
by a consummate knowledge of the social system in which they move, and
partly by a half-concealed and touching discontent of the trifles on
which their talents and affections are wasted. These are the women
who, after a youth of false pleasure, often end by an old age of false
devotion. They are a class peculiar to those ranks and countries in
which shines and saddens that gay and unhappy thing--_a woman without a
home_!

Now this was a specimen of life--this Valerie de Ventadour--that
Maltravers had never yet contemplated, and Maltravers was perhaps
equally new to the Frenchwoman. They were delighted with each other's
society, although it so happened that they never agreed.

Madame de Ventadour rode on horseback, and Maltravers was one of her
usual companions. And oh, the beautiful landscapes through which their
daily excursions lay!

Maltravers was an admirable scholar. The stores of the immortal dead
were as familiar to him as his own language. The poetry, the philosophy,
the manner of thought and habits of life--of the graceful Greek and the
luxurious Roman--were a part of knowledge that constituted a common and
household portion of his own associations and peculiarities of thought.
He had saturated his intellect with the Pactolus of old--and the
grains of gold came down from the classic Tmolus with every tide. This
knowledge of the dead, often so useless, has an inexpressible charm when
it is applied to the places where the dead lived. We care nothing about
the ancients on Highgate Hill--but at Baiae, Pompeii, by the Virgilian
Hades, the ancients are society with which we thirst to be familiar.
To the animated and curious Frenchwoman what a cicerone was Ernest
Maltravers! How eagerly she listened to accounts of a life more elegant
than that of Paris!--of a civilisation which the world never can know
again! So much the better;--for it was rotten at the core, though most
brilliant in