ver would Count Ville-Handry's first wife have been able to
recognize her reception-rooms. Where was that select society which had
been attracted by her, and which she had fashioned into something like a
court, in which her husband was king? The palace had become, so to say,
the headquarters of that motley society which forms the "Foreign Legion"
of pleasure and of scandal.

Sarah Brandon, now Countess Ville-Handry, was surrounded by that strange
aristocracy which has risen upon the ruins of old Paris,--a contraband
aristocracy, a dangerous kind of high life, which, by its unheard-of
extravagance and mysterious splendor, dazzles the multitude, and puzzles
the police.

The young countess did not exactly receive people notoriously tainted.
She was too clever to commit such a blunder; but she bestowed her
sweetest smiles upon all those equivocal Bohemians who represent all
races, and whose revenues come much less from good acres in the broad
sunlight than from the credulity and stupidity of mankind.

At first Count Ville-Handry had been rather shocked by this new world,
whose manners and customs were unknown to him, and whose language even
he hardly understood. But it had not taken long to acclimatize him.

He was the firm, the receiver of the fortune, the flag that covers the
merchandise, the master, in fine, although he exercised no authority.
All these titles secured to him the appearance of profound respect; and
all vied with each other in flattering him to the utmost, and paying
him court in the most abject manner. This led him to imagine that he
had recovered the prestige he had enjoyed in former days, thanks to
the skilful management of his first wife; and he assumed a new kind of
grotesque importance commensurate with his revived vanity.

He had, besides, gone to work once more most industriously. All the
business men who had called upon him before his marriage already
reappeared now, accompanied by that legion of famished speculators, whom
the mere report of a great enterprise attracts, like the flies settling
upon a lump of sugar. The count shut himself up with these men in his
study, and often spent the whole afternoon with them there.

"Most probably something is going on there," thought Henrietta.

She was quite sure of it when she saw her father unhesitatingly give up
the splendid suite of apartments in the lower story of the palace, which
were cut up into an infinite number of small rooms. On the doors