ignificant. Chief justices are dirt cheap. Naturally, if you
wish to be of the military profession, to have eminent clergy among your
antecedents, the price increases. Pere Issacar is the only one who can
give you, at a reasonable rate, ermine-draped bishops, or a colonel with
a Louis XIV wig, and, if you wish it, a blue ribbon and a breast-plate
under his red coat. What produces a good effect in a series of family
portraits is a series of pastels. What would you say to a goggle-eyed
abbe, or an old lady indecently decolletee, or a captain of dragoons
wearing a tigerskin cap (it is ten francs more if he has the cross of
St. Louis)? Pere Issacar knows his business, and always has in reserve
thirty of these portraits in charming frames of the period, made
expressly for him in the Faubourg St.-Antoine, and which have all been
buried fifteen days and riddled with shot, in order to have the musty
appearance and indispensable worm holes.

You can understand now why the estimable Jew, in passing through the
Louvre for his weekly promenade, took an interest in little Maria
copying the charming Marquise de Latour. He was just at this time short
of powdered marquises, and they are always very much in demand. He
begged the young woman to take her copy home and make twelve more of it,
varying, only the color of the dress and some particular detail in each
portrait. Thus, instead of the pug dog, marquise No. 2 would hold a King
Charles spaniel, No. 2 a monkey, No. 3 a bonbon box, No. 4 a fan. The
face could remain the same. All marquises looked alike to Pere Issacar;
he only exacted that they should all be provided with two black patches,
one under the right eye, the other on the left shoulder. This he
insisted upon, for the patch, in his eyes, was a symbol of the
eighteenth century.

Pere Issacar was a fair man and promised to furnish frames, paper, and
pastels, and to pay the young girl fifteen francs for each marquise.
What was better yet, he promised, if he was pleased with the first work,
to order of the young artist a dozen canonesses of Remiremont and a
half-dozen of royal gendarmes.

I wish you could have seen those ladies when Maria went home to tell the
good news. Louise had just returned from distributing semiquavers in the
city; her eyes and poor Mother Gerard's were filled with tears of joy.

"What, my darling," said the mother, embracing her child, "are you going
to trouble yourself about our necessaries of life, to