giboyée I was eating, would permit.-How much less understood than ever must she be!How cruelly out of place the leaden placeman before me, at the feet of that etherial being,that more impassioned Julie, that more spiritualized Delphine!-And lo! I murmured between my teeth and my fleur-de-lysed soup spoon, "O ma chère Thérèse !" with an accent that Mademoiselle Duchesnois must have imitated in the "O mon cher Curiace!" of her Horaces.

CHAPTER VI.

Avec le bec de l'oiseau de proie, l'œil clair et froid, la parole douce, elle est polie comme l'acier d'un mécanique. Elle émeut tout,-moins le cœur.-BALZAC.

Hæc tùm multiplici populus sermone gaudens.-ÆNEID.

AMID the glare of that brilliant banquet, I was seated beside the Austrian Ambassadress, then young and fair, as now gracious and agreeable; and next her, sat the English Ambassador-neither young nor fair, but as agreeable as herself. It struck me, however, that he was less fluent than usual; and I soon discovered the cause, in a sort of nasal chaunt proceeding from his neighbour on the other side; of whom all I could see was a portentously stern, stiff, dark-green bérêt; - and all I could hear, a jargon of mingled pedantry and

devotion, like all Geneva,-(I mean the puritanical city, not the spirit of that name,)corked up and iced for use.

Gods! how the woman did prose!-It must go against the grain of a Frenchwoman to prose, so fluently easy is their natural elocution. But this one, prosed as if prosing for the whole nation.-And so she was!-for it was no other than the wife of Monsieur le Ministre de l'instruction publique !—“ Oh! ma chère Thérèse !"

Well! if I had been gifted with common sense, it was no more than I might have expected. The coquette of five-and-twenty was, at forty, a savante and a prude. She, who had talked buttercups to me in our drives in the Bois de Boulogne, till I grew as de-pastoralized as a lord mayor,-and who had minced metaphysics small enough for the swallow of a canary bird, till I became as material and matter-of-fact as Grimod de la Reynière,―now talked precisely in the style of the premier

Paris, or great letters of a Ministerial Journal! She had the interior of Africa as completely at her finger tips as the Missionary Society; and was in correspondence with a tribe of Japanese Numbo Jumbos about the Tatar origin of the Loo Tchoo language.

It answered!" La femme d'un homme politique," says a clever writer of the day," est une machine à gouvernement, un mécanique à beaux complimens, à révérences; c'est le premier, le plus fidèle des iustrumens dont se sert un ambitieux."--Madame de St. Gratien was a leading article with the Dauphine, and a luminary of the court of Charles X. It was even whispered that her influence had assigned to the weighty Anacharsis his present eminent position. Thérèse was no longer incomprise. She was understood from the Indus to the Pole-nay, I believe, she talked all the dialects of the intervening lands.-She was said to write pamphlets for the Ministry,—those bits of scribbled paper without which the kite of

an administration cannot steady itself, or rise high enough for popular applause; and with such a head, and such a bérêt to cover it, I no longer wondered at her having silenced the pleasant chat of my friend Sir Charles!

I flattered myself meanwhile that the Administratrix of Public Education would have been as glad to drop the acquaintance of Cis. Danby, as he, hers. And so perhaps she

would. But the Honourable Cecil was now a man whom the King of England delighted to honour, and consequently highly deserving the notice of the obedient humble servants of the King of France.

Immediately after dinner, therefore, from which it is customary in France to emerge in couples, like the Noah family entering the ark, or the dramatis persona arranged on the stage at the close of a comedy,-Madame la Comtesse de St. Gratien dropped the arm of her cavalier, the General in waiting, as starch, stiff, and we 11 matched with her as the twin