ount
of Becky's biography, but of this part, the less, perhaps, that is said
the better.

They say that, when Mrs. Crawley was particularly down on her luck, she
gave concerts and lessons in music here and there. There was a Madame
de Raudon, who certainly had a matinee musicale at Wildbad, accompanied
by Herr Spoff, premier pianist to the Hospodar of Wallachia, and my
little friend Mr. Eaves, who knew everybody and had travelled
everywhere, always used to declare that he was at Strasburg in the year
1830, when a certain Madame Rebecque made her appearance in the opera
of the Dame Blanche, giving occasion to a furious row in the theatre
there. She was hissed off the stage by the audience, partly from her
own incompetency, but chiefly from the ill-advised sympathy of some
persons in the parquet, (where the officers of the garrison had their
admissions); and Eaves was certain that the unfortunate debutante in
question was no other than Mrs. Rawdon Crawley.

She was, in fact, no better than a vagabond upon this earth. When she
got her money she gambled; when she had gambled it she was put to
shifts to live; who knows how or by what means she succeeded? It is
said that she was once seen at St. Petersburg, but was summarily
dismissed from that capital by the police, so that there cannot be any
possibility of truth in the report that she was a Russian spy at
Toplitz and Vienna afterwards. I have even been informed that at Paris
she discovered a relation of her own, no less a person than her
maternal grandmother, who was not by any means a Montmorenci, but a
hideous old box-opener at a theatre on the Boulevards. The meeting
between them, of which other persons, as it is hinted elsewhere, seem
to have been acquainted, must have been a very affecting interview.
The present historian can give no certain details regarding the event.

It happened at Rome once that Mrs. de Rawdon's half-year's salary had
just been paid into the principal banker's there, and, as everybody who
had a balance of above five hundred scudi was invited to the balls
which this prince of merchants gave during the winter, Becky had the
honour of a card, and appeared at one of the Prince and Princess
Polonia's splendid evening entertainments. The Princess was of the
family of Pompili, lineally descended from the second king of Rome, and
Egeria of the house of Olympus, while the Prince's grandfather,
Alessandro Polonia, sold wash-balls, essences, tobacc