ws, his name could not be
spoken in public assemblies without being preceded by the epithet of
honorable. A man so seriously occupied in saving the Capitol, that is to
say, in courageously sustaining the stronger, approving the majorities
in all of their mean actions and thus increasing his own ground,
sinecures, tips, stocks, and various other advantages, necessarily
neglected his charming wife, and took very little notice of the ridicule
that she inflicted upon him often, and to which he seemed predestined.

The fair lady--with a wax doll's beauty, not very young, confining
herself to George Sand in literature, making three toilettes a day, and
having a large account at the dentist's--singled out the young poet with
a romantic head, and rapidly traversed with him the whole route through
the country of Love. Thanks to modern progress, the voyage is now made
by a through train. After passing the smaller stations, "blushing
behind the fan," a "significant pressure of the hand," "appointment in a
museum," etc., and halting at a station of very little importance called
"scruples" (ten minutes' pause), Amedee reached the terminus of the line
and was the most enviable of mortals. He became Madame's lapdog, the
essential ornament in her drawing-room, figured at all the dinners,
balls, and routs where she appeared, stifled his yawns at the back of
her box at the Opera, and received the confidential mission of going
to hunt for sweetmeats and chocolates in the foyer. His recompense
consisted in metaphysical conversations and sentimental seances, in
which he was not long in discovering that his heart was blinded by his
emotions. At the end of a few months of this commonplace happiness,
the rupture took place without any regrets on either side, and Amedee
returned, without a pang, the love-tokens he had received, namely: a
photograph, a package of letters in imitation of fashionable romances,
written in long, angular handwriting, after the English style, upon very
chic paper; and, we must not forget, a white glove which was a little
yellowed from confinement in the casket, like the beautiful Madame
herself.

A tall girl, with a body like a goddess, who earned three hundred francs
a month by showing her costumes on the Vaudeville stage, and who gave
one louis a day to her hairdresser, gave Amedee a new experience in
love, more expensive, but much more amusing than the first. There were
no more psychological subtleties or hazy con