their title and their name.

Musette, therefore, was an honest and pretty girl, who in love adopted
half of Champfort's famous amphoris, "Love is the interchange of two
caprices." Thus her connection had never been preceded by one of those
shameful bargains which dishonor modern gallantry. As she herself said,
Musette played fair and insisted that she should receive full change for
her sincerity.

But if her fancies were lively and spontaneous, they were never durable
enough to reach the height of a passion. And the excessive mobility of
her caprices, the little care she took to look at the purse and the
boots of those who wished to be considered amongst them, brought about a
corresponding mobility in her existence which was a perpetual
alternation of blue broughams and omnibuses, first floors and fifth
stories, silken gowns and cotton frocks. Oh cleaning girl! Living poem
of youth with ringing laugh and joyous song! Tender heart beating for
one and all beneath your half-open bodice! Ah Mademoiselle Musette,
sister of Bernette and Mimi Pinson, it would need the pen of Alfred de
Musset to fitly narrate your careless and vagabond course amidst the
flowery paths of youth; and he would certainly have celebrated you, if
like me, he had heard you sing in your pretty false notes, this couplet
from one of your favorite ditties:

"It was a day in Spring
When love I strove to sing
Unto a nut brown maid.
O'er face as fair as dawn
Cast a bewitching shade,"

The story we are about to tell is one of the most charming in the life
of this charming adventuress who wore so many green gowns.

At a time when she was the mistress of a young Counsellor of State, who
had gallantly placed in her hands the key of his ancestral coffers,
Mademoiselle Musette was in the habit of receiving once a week in her
pretty drawing room in the Rue de la Bruyere. These evenings resembled
most Parisian evenings, with the difference that people amused
themselves. When there was not enough room they sat on one another's
knees, and it often happened that the same glass served for two.
Rodolphe, who was a friend of Musette and never anything more than a
friend, without either of them knowing why--Rodolphe asked leave to
bring his friend, the painter Marcel.

"A young fellow of talent," he added, "for whom the future is
embroidering his Academician's coat."

"Bring him," said Musette.

The evening they were to go together to Mu