ayed its beauties with an eager desire for his admiration of them.
He took it and slowly turned it about, commending its fine workmanship
and pretty enamel and jewelry; then putting it to his ear, with a most
mischievous look of affected surprise, he exclaimed, as one does to a
child's watch, "Why, it goes, I declare!"

To my great regret and loss, I saw Mademoiselle Mars only in two parts,
when, in the autumn of her beauty and powers, she played a short
engagement in London. The grace, the charm, the loveliness, which she
retained far into middle age, were, even in their decline, enough to
justify all that her admirers said of her early incomparable
fascination. Her figure had grown large and her face become round, and
lost their fine outline and proportion; but the exquisite taste of her
dress and graceful dignity of her deportment, and sweet radiance of her
expressive countenance, were still indescribably charming; and the
voice, unrivaled in its fresh melodious brilliancy, and the pure and
perfect enunciation, were unimpaired, and sounded like the clear liquid
utterance of a young girl of sixteen. Her Celimene and her Elmire I
never had the good fortune to see, but can imagine, from her performance
of the heroine in Casimir de la Vigne's capital play of "L'Ecole des
Vieillards," how well she must have deserved her unrivaled reputation in
those parts.

It is remarkable that one of the most striking points in Madame d'Orval
was suggested by herself to the author. De la Vigne, according to the
frequent usage of French authors, was reading his piece to the great
actress, upon whom its success was mainly to depend, and when he came to
the scene where the offended but unjustly suspicious husband recounts to
his wife the details of his duel with the young duke whose attentions to
her had excited his jealousy, and that when, full of the tenderest
anxiety for his safety, she flies to meet him, and is repulsed by the
bitter irony of his speech, beginning, "Rassurez-vous, madame, le duc
n'est point blesse," Mademoiselle Mars, having listened in silence till
the end of D'Orval's speech, exclaimed, "Mais, quoi! je ne dis rien,
elle ne dit rien!" De la Vigne, who had made the young woman listen in
speechless anguish to the bitter and unjust reproach conveyed by her
husband's first words and his subsequent account of the duel, said, in
some surprise at Mademoiselle Mars' suggestion, "Mais quoi encore--que
peut-elle dire? que voud