ne attracted the attention she
did. Even the sober president and assessors sat staring at her
open-mouthed when she took her stand behind the little rail which does
duty for a witness-box in France. She was dressed in mourning--not the
deepest, but soft masses of silk and lace--and when she lifted her veil
and took off her glove to take the prescribed oath, a murmur of
admiration ran through the court. That is why she had undertaken the
journey to Rouen, and verily she had her reward.

It was on that occasion that I became acquainted, though quite by
accident, with the young man who, ten or eleven years later, was to leap
into fame all of a sudden with one novel. I have already said that the
court was very crowded, and next to me was standing a tall, strapping
fellow, somewhat younger than myself, whom, at the first glance, one
would have taken to be an English country gentleman or well-to-do
farmer's son. Such mistakes are easily made in Normandy. When Lola
Montes came forward to give her evidence, some one on the other side of
him remarked that she looked like the heroine of a novel.

"Yes," he replied; "but the heroines of the real novels enacted in
everyday life do not always look like that."

Then he turned to me, having seen me speak to several people from Paris
and in company of Alexandre Dumas and Berryer, whom everybody knew. He
asked me some particulars about Lola Montes, which I gave him. I found
him exceedingly well-informed. We chatted for a while. When he left he
handed me his card, and hoped that we should see one another again. The
card bore the simple superscription of "Gustave Flaubert." I was told
during the evening that he was the son of a local physician of note.
Twelve years later the whole of France rang with his name. He had
written "Madame Bovary," and laid the foundation of what subsequently
became the ultra-realistic school of French fiction.

To return for a moment to Lola Montes. The trial was really the
starting-point of her notoriety, for, in spite of her beauty, she had
been at one time reduced to sing in the streets in Brussels. That was
after she had fled from Calcutta, whither her first husband, a captain
or lieutenant James, in the service of the East India Company, had taken
her. She landed at Southampton, and, during her journey to London,
managed to ingratiate herself with an English nobleman, by pretending
that she was the wife a Spanish soldier who had been shot by the
Carlis