ich she
prays so fervently for Lord Kew's conversion. He is the "Q" who rescued
the princess from the Arabs, and performed many a feat which lives in
her glowing pages. He persists in saying that he never rescued Madame la
Princesse from any Arabs at all, except from one beggar who was bawling
out for bucksheesh, and whom Kew drove away with a stick. They made
pilgrimages to all the holy places, and a piteous sight it was, said
Lord Kew, to see the old prince in the Jerusalem processions at Easter
pacing with bare feet and a candle. Here Lord Kew separated from
the prince's party. His name does not occur in the last part of the
Footprints; which, in truth, are filled full of strange rhapsodies,
adventures which nobody was but the princess, and mystic disquisitions.
She hesitates at nothing, like other poets of her nation: not profoundly
learned, she invents where she has not acquired: mingles together
religion and the opera; and performs Parisian pas-de-ballet before the
gates of monasteries and the cells of anchorites. She describes, as if
she had herself witnessed the catastrophe, the passage of the Red
Sea: and, as if there were no doubt of the transaction, an unhappy
love-affair between Pharaoh's eldest son and Moses's daughter. At Cairo,
apropos of Joseph's granaries, she enters into a furious tirade against
Putiphar, whom she paints as an old savage, suspicious and a tyrant.
They generally have a copy of the Footprints of the Gazelles at the
Circulating Library at Baden, as Madame d'Ivry constantly visits that
watering-place. M. le Duc was not pleased with the book, which was
published entirely without his concurrence, and which he described as
one of the ten thousand follies of Madame la Duchesse.

This nobleman was five-and-forty years older than his duchess. France
is the country where that sweet Christian institution of mariages de
convenance (which so many folks of the family about which this story
treats are engaged in arranging) is most in vogue. There the newspapers
daily announce that M. de Foy has a bureau de confiance, where families
may arrange marriages for their sons and daughters in perfect comfort
and security. It is but a question of money on one side and the other.
Mademoiselle has so many francs of dot; Monsieur has such and such
rentes or lands in possession or reversion, an etude d'avoue, a shop
with a certain clientele bringing him such and such an income, which may
be doubled by the judiciou