"If she could only hear that any living man contemplated so terrible a breach of decorum!" cried her friend. "But Monsieur Danby is excusable. He is a foreigner. He is a foreigner. Every thing is

permitted to foreigners. He cannot be expected to be aware of the strictness of etiquette that prevails in the Hotel of the Ministre de l'Instruction Publique."

"You are to know," resumed Madame de la Bélinaye, "that Madame de St. Gratien, who is honoured with the friendship and esteem of the Dauphiness, is one of the most exemplary women of the day. She goes to confession every third day; and would not touch the claw of a shrimp on Fridays.-Nothing is too rigid for her. Her life is a series of macerations.I know not whether it be by way of penance, but she would not receive a morning visit from one of your abandoned sex, to conquer an Empire. If you wish to pay your respects, it must be at her official soirée. Monday nights are appointed for the receptions of Monsieur le

Ministre de l'Instruction Publique; and you cannot do better than go and kiss the footstool of the throne of our Aspasia."

"I cannot do better than obey any commands with which you are pleased to honour me," said I.

And I could all the better endure the prospect of this solemn visitation, because I was engaged to a ball on the following Monday at the Austrian Embassy, which would take the taste of the bitter pill out of my mouth.—

I detest all parties where men predominate. -Shrubberies are invariably the better for the introduction of a few roses and lilies amid their solemn verdure; and the better qualities of manly nature are not called into play, when there are no petticoats in the case.

It was from a little family party at the Duchesse de Dijon's, the mother of Madame de la Bélinaye, a circle exhibiting all the agrémens derivable from a group of lovely women, beheld in the easy negligence of

domestic life, that I proceeded to the awful Hotel of the Ministre de l'Instruction Publique, in whose court-yard a variety of official equipages were drawn up; while, outside the porte cochère, waited a long string of citadines and cabriolets, which I conjectured to belong to the Savans, forming the pit and gallery of the auditory.

Two huissiers de service wearing silver chains over their customary suits of solemn black, ushered me through two chambers exceedingly hot and stuffy, crowded with the worst looking and worst smelling men with whom it was ever my fortune to be in company in Paris;-the exhibition of oddly shaped heads, and still more oddly made wigs, being worthy of a perukial museum. I conclude I had never before beheld developed any really intellectual phrenological bumps!

These men, who were hooked together in groups of two or more, by process of buttonholding and for the process of prosification,

made a line respectfully for the grooms of the chambers and contemptuously for me; for I give my readers to conceive what must have been the effect produced by an essenced beau of the court of George IV. with shapely waist, curled whiskers, and all Delcroix distilling from his cambric, amid those greasy rogues,-artists, men of letters, men of syllables,academicians, members of the Institute, and all the dirty-doggery of literature.

Every body knows the retort of the Duke of Richelieu to Restaut the grammarian, when they met at the French Academy. "Moi, je suis ici pour ma grammaire," said the learned man. “Et moi, pour mon grandpère,”—replied the wit. Biot, the first man I met at the Ministère de l'Instruction publique, was there for the longitude,-I, clearly, as a latitudinarian.—But

Magis magnos clericos non sunt magis magnos sapientes,

or, as the bitter Regnier writes

Les plus grands clercs ne sont pas les plus fins!

I would not have recommended any body to talk about latitudinarians to the woman who rose to perform her three official curtseys to my three bows of ceremony, as I was ushered to the foot of her arm-chair!-She had a little moyen age fan of peacock's feathers in her hand, which formed a truly appropriate adornment; for never did I see a woman so conceitedly self-absorbed. Severe as a statue of Nemesis, I had done injustice to her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, by instituting a parallel between them. Queen Bess in her ruff and farthingale was light and easy by comparison; and Madame la Comtesse de St. Gratien, doing the honours of her Ministére to half a dozen women who looked as if dug out of the Escurial, and two hundred men who might have been de-mummified out of the Pyramids, assumed a rigidity of form and feature, reminding one far more of the print of Bloody Mary in the school editions of Hume's History of England.