Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories

écrire une nouvelle comédi

car il s'occupe toujours à le cherc

e made méringues and fanfreluches, and dreamed of libretti while he whisked the cream for a supper, been within hearing, they would have taken the smart from the sting; and,

illars, D'Etissac, Duras, D'Argenson-a crowd of others-surrounded and superintended her toilette, in a glittering troop of courtiers and gentlemen. Dames d'atours (for she had her maids of honor as well as Marie Leczinska) handed her her flacons of perfume, or her numberless notes, on gold salvers, chased by Réveil; the ermine beneath her feet, humbly sent by the Russian ambassador-far superior to what the Czarina sent to Madame de Mailly-had cost two thousand louis; her bedroom outshone in

the Blood, a Duchess of Fra

pers; she had a country villa that eclipsed Trianon; she had fêtes that outshone the fêtes at Versailles; she had a "droit de chasse" in one of the royal districts;

of France? No; much m

er in France-for was she not the Empress of the Comédie? If Madame Lenormand d'Etioles ruled the government at Versailles, Mademoiselle Thargélie Dumarsais ruled t

wait until it was her pleasure to play at his private theatre; dukes, marquises, viscounts, chevaliers, vied who should ruin himself most magnificently and most utterly for her; and lovers the most brilliant and the most flattering, from Richelieu, Roi de Ruelles, to Dorat, poet of boudoir-graces and court-Sapphos, left the titled beauties of Versailles for the self-crowned Empress of the Fran?ais. She had all Paris for her chentela, from Vers

ttering simile and soft-breathed compliment; ravishingly beautiful, as she laughed at Maurice de Saxe, or made a disdainful moue at an impromptu couplet of Dorat's, or gave a blow of her fan to Richelieu, or asked Saint-Aulaire what he thought of Vanloo's portrait of her as Rodug

le Duc, as every one knows, never sued at court or coulisse in vain, and the love of Thargélie Dumarsais, though perhaps with a stronger touch of romance in it than was often found in the atmosphere of the foyer, was, like the love of her time an

llonne, sans ent

de fers, de soie

iled her as head-priestess of her pleasant creed, i

fty louis!" cried one of Thargélie Dumarsais's court, the Marquis de la Thorillière, meeting a friend of his who had arrived in Paris onl

ars, you know. What can I tell of its idols, as

must be to have been buried in those benighted Britann

thought it could belong to nobody less than to Madame Lenormand d'Etioles; b

you have been once to the Fran?ais; that is, if you have the good fortune to attract her eyes and please her fancy, which you may do, for

stay long enough to fulfil it, and steal y

imbibed a taste for spleen and solitude! Have you written anothe

ine to-morrow. It is five years

t shall be a hundred before I see them again. Hors de Paris, c'est hors du monde. Com

I talk in Hebrew to you. You have been lounging away your days in titled beauties, petits salons, making butterfly verses, learning their broidery, their lisp, and their per

what woman is he not? Thargélie is very fond of the Marshals of France! Saxe is fettered to her hand and foot, and the Duchesse de Bouillon hates her as rancorously as she does Adrienne. Come and see her play Phèdre to-night, and you will renounce Lorraine. I will take you to supper with her a

threaten to la

shoulders, and gave his b

e that weathercock may have veered to-morrow, as to predict where la Duma

ill Stanislaus, I believe, found Lucille's eyes lovelier than Madame la Marquise deemed fit, and then

ther, were too strong for her. All the gossip of that Metz affair reached you across the water, I suppose? Those pests of Jesuits! if they want him to be their Very Christian King, and to cure him of his worship of Cupidon, they will have to pull down all the stones of La

, a charming little blonde, patched and powdered, nestled in a chair before a fire of perfumed wood, teasing her monkey Zulmé with a fan of Pater's, and giving a pr

on from Lunéville, he had passed his youth less in pleasure than in those philosophical and political problems then beginning to agitate a few minds; which were developed later on in the "Encyclopédie," later still in the Assemblée Nationale. Voltaire and Helvétius had spoken well of him at Madame de Geoffrin's; Claudine de Tencin had introduced him the night before in her brilliant

t of them it is a desert of ennui! What can you mean, Léon, by leaving Paris to-morrow? Ah, m

there not

ut what? Any love you had there five years ago has hardly any attractions now.

e love, madame, that

d fancy, smouldering, smouldering on and on like an ill-lit fire. Nobody wo

le of a man who has happy thought

one. The greatest pang of my enforced exile was the parting from o

e of her beautiful blue eyes. "You are a very strange man. You have lived out of France till you have grown wretchedly serious and eccentric. Loved th

mbered Favette as I saw her last under the elm-boughs in the summer light, her eyes dim with the tears of our parting, her young heart heaving with its first grief. I have loved her too well for others to have power to efface or to supplant her; of her only have I thought, of her only have I dreamed, holding her but the dearer as the years grew further from the hour of our separation, nearer to the hour of our reunion. I have heard no word of her since we parted; but of what value is love without

d amidst the mots, the madrigals, the laughter of her world of Paris, Versailles, and Choisy. She s

wn here. A word of the heart amongst us sounds