in due time flew away. The other died in the nest of
cotton-wool you had made him. 'It was the one I loved best,' I remember
you said. That day, Elodie, you were wearing a red bow in your hair."

Philippe Dubois and Brotteaux, a little behind the rest, were talking of
Rome, where they had both been, the latter in '72, the other towards the
last days of the Academy. Brotteaux indeed had never forgotten the
Princess Mondragone, to whom he would most certainly have poured out
his plaints but for the Count Altieri, who always followed her like her
shadow. Nor did Philippe Dubois fail to mention that he had been invited
to dine with Cardinal de Bernis and that he was the most obliging host
in the world.

"I knew him," said Brotteaux, "and I may add without boasting that I was
for some while one of his most intimate friends; he had a taste for low
society. He was an amiable man, and for all his affectation of telling
fairy tales, there was more sound philosophy in his little finger than
in the heads of all you Jacobins, who are for making us virtuous and
God-fearing by Act of Parliament. Upon my word I prefer our
simple-minded theophagists who know not what they say nor yet what they
do, to these mad law-menders, who make it their business to guillotine
us in order to render us wise and virtuous and adorers of the Supreme
Being who has created them in His likeness. In former days I used to
have Mass said in the Chapel at Les Ilettes by a poor devil of a Cure
who used to say in his cups: 'Don't let's speak ill of sinners; we live
by 'em, we priests, unworthy as we are!' You must agree, sir, this
prayer-monger held sound maxims of government. We should adopt his
principles, and govern men as being what they are and not what we should
like them to be."

Rose Thevenin had meantime drawn closer to the old man. She knew he had
lived on a grand scale, and the thought of this gilded the _ci-devant_
financier's present poverty, which she deemed less humiliating as being
due to general causes, the result of the public bankruptcy. She saw in
him, with curiosity not unmixed with respect, the survival of one of
those open-handed millionaires of whom her elder comrades of the stage
spoke with sighs of unfeigned regret. Besides, the old fellow in his
plum-coloured coat, so threadbare and so well brushed, pleased her by
his agreeable address.

"Monsieur Brotteaux," she said to him, "we know how once upon a time, in
a noble park, on moonl