was
only a quiet old gentleman, husband to Mrs. Eagles, with a taste for
geology, and not tall enough to reach anybody's ears.

The Eagles then patronized Mrs. Rawdon, took her to live with her at
her own house at Paris, quarrelled with the ambassador's wife because
she would not receive her protegee, and did all that lay in woman's
power to keep Becky straight in the paths of virtue and good repute.

Becky was very respectable and orderly at first, but the life of
humdrum virtue grew utterly tedious to her before long. It was the
same routine every day, the same dulness and comfort, the same drive
over the same stupid Bois de Boulogne, the same company of an evening,
the same Blair's Sermon of a Sunday night--the same opera always being
acted over and over again; Becky was dying of weariness, when, luckily
for her, young Mr. Eagles came from Cambridge, and his mother, seeing
the impression which her little friend made upon him, straightway gave
Becky warning.

Then she tried keeping house with a female friend; then the double
menage began to quarrel and get into debt. Then she determined upon a
boarding-house existence and lived for some time at that famous mansion
kept by Madame de Saint Amour, in the Rue Royale, at Paris, where she
began exercising her graces and fascinations upon the shabby dandies
and fly-blown beauties who frequented her landlady's salons. Becky
loved society and, indeed, could no more exist without it than an
opium-eater without his dram, and she was happy enough at the period of
her boarding-house life. "The women here are as amusing as those in
May Fair," she told an old London friend who met her, "only, their
dresses are not quite so fresh. The men wear cleaned gloves, and are
sad rogues, certainly, but they are not worse than Jack This and Tom
That. The mistress of the house is a little vulgar, but I don't think
she is so vulgar as Lady ------" and here she named the name of a great
leader of fashion that I would die rather than reveal. In fact, when
you saw Madame de Saint Amour's rooms lighted up of a night, men with
plaques and cordons at the ecarte tables, and the women at a little
distance, you might fancy yourself for a while in good society, and
that Madame was a real Countess. Many people did so fancy, and Becky
was for a while one of the most dashing ladies of the Countess's salons.

But it is probable that her old creditors of 1815 found her out and
caused her to leave