er, Lord Dudley, he had derived a pair of
the most amorously deceiving blue eyes; from his mother the bushiest of
black hair, from both pure blood, the skin of a young girl, a gentle
and modest expression, a refined and aristocratic figure, and beautiful
hands. For a woman, to see him was to lose her head for him; do you
understand? to conceive one of those desires which eat the heart, which
are forgotten because of the impossibility of satisfying them, because
women in Paris are commonly without tenacity. Few of them say to
themselves, after the fashion of men, the "_Je Maintiendrai_," of the
House of Orange.

Underneath this fresh young life, and in spite of the limpid springs in
his eyes, Henri had a lion's courage, a monkey's agility. He could cut a
ball in half at ten paces on the blade of a knife; he rode his horse
in a way that made you realize the fable of the Centaur; drove a
four-in-hand with grace; was as light as a cherub and quiet as a lamb,
but knew how to beat a townsman at the terrible game of _savate_ or
cudgels; moreover, he played the piano in a fashion which would have
enabled him to become an artist should he fall on calamity, and owned
a voice which would have been worth to Barbaja fifty thousand francs a
season. Alas, that all these fine qualities, these pretty faults, were
tarnished by one abominable vice: he believed neither in man nor woman,
God nor Devil. Capricious nature had commenced by endowing him, a priest
had completed the work.

To render this adventure comprehensible, it is necessary to add here
that Lord Dudley naturally found many women disposed to reproduce
samples of such a delicious pattern. His second masterpiece of this
kind was a young girl named Euphemie, born of a Spanish lady, reared in
Havana, and brought to Madrid with a young Creole woman of the Antilles,
and with all the ruinous tastes of the Colonies, but fortunately married
to an old and extremely rich Spanish noble, Don Hijos, Marquis de
San-Real, who, since the occupation of Spain by French troops, had taken
up his abode in Paris, and lived in the Rue St. Lazare. As much from
indifference as from any respect for the innocence of youth, Lord Dudley
was not in the habit of keeping his children informed of the relations
he created for them in all parts. That is a slightly inconvenient form
of civilization; it has so many advantages that we must overlook its
drawbacks in consideration of its benefits. Lord Dudley, to m