ation to induce them to give as lavishly, and to
enable her to make a "record" amount.

The original meeting of Nicodeme and the fair Javotte takes place in
this wise, and enables the author to enlighten us further as to matters
quite proper for novel treatment.[262] The device of keeping gold and
large silver pieces uppermost in the open "plate"; the counter-balancing
mischief of covering them with a handful of copper; the licensed habit,
a rather dangerous one surely, of taking "change" out of that plate,
which enables the aspirant for the girl's favour to clear away the
obnoxious _sous_ as change for a whole pistole--all this has a kind of
attraction for which you may search the more than myriad pages of
_Artamene_ without finding it. The daughter of a citizen's family, in
the French seventeenth century, was kept with a strictness which perhaps
explains a good deal in the conduct of an Agnes or an Isabelle in
comedy. She was almost always tied to her mother's apron-strings, and
even an accepted lover had to carry on his courtship under the very
superfluous number of _six_ eyes at least. But the Church was
misericordious. The custom of giving and receiving holy water could be
improved by the resources of amatory science; but this of the _quete_
was, it would seem, still more full of opportunity. Apparently (perhaps
because in these city parishes the church was always close by, and the
whole proceedings public) the fair _queteuse_ was allowed to walk home
alone; and in this instance Nicodeme, having ground-baited with his
pistole, is permitted to accompany Javotte Vollichon to her father's
door--her extreme beauty making up for the equally extreme silliness of
her replies to his observations.

The possible objection that these things, fresh and interesting to us,
were ordinary and banal to them, would be a rather shallow one. The
point is that, in previous fiction, circumstantial verisimilitude of
this kind had hardly been tried at all. So it is with the incident of
Nicodeme sending a rabbit (supposed to be from his own estate, but
really from the market--a joke not peculiar to Paris, but specially
favoured there), or losing at bowls a capon, to old Vollichon, and on
the strength of each inviting himself to dinner; the fresh girds at the
extraordinary and still not quite accountable plenty of marquises
(Scarron, if I remember rightly, has the verb _se marquiser_); and the
contributory (or, as the ancients would have s