"Come, uncle, if it were only to enable you to get at the truth of
this business, grant my request. You will come as the examining judge,

since matters do not seem to you very clear. Deuce take it! It is as
necessary to cross-question the Marquise as it is to examine the

Marquis."
"You are right," said the lawyer. "It is quite possible that it is she

who is mad. I will go."
"I will call for you. Write down in your engagement book: 'To-morrow

evening at nine, Madame d'Espard.'--Good!" said Bianchon, seeing his
uncle make a note of the engagement.

Next evening at nine Bianchon mounted his uncle's dusty staircase, and
found him at work on the statement of some complicated judgment. The

coat Lavienne had ordered of the tailor had not been sent, so Popinot
put on his old stained coat, and was the Popinot unadorned whose

appearance made those laugh who did not know the secrets of his
private life. Bianchon, however, obtained permission to pull his

cravat straight, and to button his coat, and he hid the stains by
crossing the breast of it with the right side over the left, and so

displaying the new front of the cloth. But in a minute the judge
rucked the coat up over his chest by the way in which he stuffed his

hands into his pockets, obeying an irresistible habit. Thus the coat,
deeply wrinkled both in front and behind, made a sort of hump in the

middle of the back, leaving a gap between the waistcoat and trousers
through which his shirt showed. Bianchon, to his sorrow, only

discovered this crowning absurdity at the moment when his uncle
entered the Marquise's room.

A brief sketch of the person and the career of the lady in whose
presence the doctor and the judge now found themselves is necessary

for an understanding of her interview with Popinot.
Madame d'Espard had, for the last seven years, been very much the

fashion in Paris, where Fashion can raise and drop by turns various
personages who, now great and now small, that is to say, in view or

forgotten, are at last quite intolerable--as discarded ministers are,
and every kind of decayed sovereignty. These flatterers of the past,

odious with their stale pretensions, know everything, speak ill of
everything, and, like ruined profligates, are friends with all the

world. Since her husband had separated from her in 1815, Madame
d'Espard must have married in the beginning of 1812. Her children,

therefore, were aged respectively fifteen and thirteen. By what luck
was the mother of a family, about three-and-thirty years of age, still

the fashion?
Though Fashion is capricious, and no one can foresee who shall be her

favorites, though she often exalts a banker's wife, or some woman of
very doubtfulelegance and beauty, it certainly seems supernatural

when Fashion puts on constitutional airs and gives promotion for age.
But in this case Fashion had done as the world did, and accepted

Madame d'Espard as still young.
The Marquise, who was thirty-three by her register of birth, was

twenty-two in a drawing-room in the evening. But by what care, what
artifice! Elaborate curls shaded her temples. She condemned herself to

live in twilight, affecting illness so as to sit under the protecting
tones of light filtered through muslin. Like Diane de Poitiers, she

used cold water in her bath, and, like her again, the Marquise slept
on a horse-hair mattress, with morocco-covered pillows to preserve her

hair; she ate very little, only drank water, and observed monastic
regularity in the smallest actions of her life.

This severesystem has, it is said, been carried so far as to the use
of ice instead of water, and nothing but cold food, by a famous Polish

lady of our day who spends a life, now verging on a century old, after
the fashion of a town belle. Fated to live as long as Marion Delorme,

whom history has credited with surviving to be a hundred and thirty,
the old vice-queen of Poland, at the age of nearly a hundred, has the

heart and brain of youth, a charming face, an elegant shape; and in
her conversation, sparkling with brilliancy like faggots in the fire,

she can compare the men and books of our literature with the men and
books of the eighteenth century. Living in Warsaw, she orders her caps

of Herbault in Paris. She is a great lady with the amiability of a
mere girl; she swims, she runs like a schoolboy, and can sink on to a

sofa with the grace of a young coquette; she mocks at death, and
laughs at life. After having astonished the Emperor Alexander, she can

still amaze the Emperor Nicholas by the splendor of her
entertainments. She can still bring tears to the eyes of a youthful

lover, for her age is whatever she pleases, and she has the exquisite
self-devotion of a grisette. In short, she is herself a fairy tale,

unless, indeed, she is a fairy.
Had Madame d'Espard known Madame Zayonseck? Did she mean to imitate

her career? Be that as it may, the Marquise proved the merits of the
treatment; her complexion was clear, her brow unwrinkled, her figure,

like that of Henri II.'s lady-love, preserved the litheness, the
freshness, the covered charms which bring a woman love and keep it

alive. The simple precautions of this course, suggested by art and
nature, and perhaps by experience, had met in her with a general

system which confirmed the results. The Marquise was absolutely
indifferent to everything that was not herself: men amused her, but no

man had ever caused her those deep agitations which stir both natures
to their depths, and wreck one on the other. She knew neither hatred

nor love. When she was offended, she avenged herself coldly, quietly,
at her leisure, waiting for the opportunity to gratify the ill-will

she cherished against anybody who dwelt in her unfavorable
remembrance. She made no fuss, she did not excite herself, she talked,

because she knew that by two words a woman may cause the death of
three men.

She had parted from M. d'Espard with the greatest satisfaction. Had he
not taken with him two children who at present were troublesome, and

in the future would stand in the way of her pretensions? Her most
intimate friends, as much as her least persistent admirers, seeing

about her none of Cornelia's jewels, who come and go, and
unconsciously betray their mother's age, took her for quite a young

woman. The two boys, about whom she seemed so anxious in her petition,
were, like their father, as unknown in the world as the northwest

passage is unknown to navigators. M. d'Espard was supposed to be an
eccentric personage who had deserted his wife without having the

smallest cause for complaint against her.
Mistress of herself at two-and-twenty, and mistress of her fortune of

twenty-six thousand francs a year, the Marquise hesitated long before
deciding on a course of action and ordering her life. Though she

benefited by the expenses her husband had incurred in his house,
though she had all the furniture, the carriages, the horses, in short,

all the details of a handsome establishment, she lived a retired life
during the years 1816, 17, and 18, a time when families were

recovering from the disasters resulting from political tempests. She
belonged to one of the most important and illustrious families of the

Faubourg Saint-Germain, and her parents advised her to live with them
as much as possible after the separation forced upon her by her

husband's inexplicable caprice.
In 1820 the Marquise roused herself from her lethargy; she went to

Court, appeared at parties, and entertained in her own house. From
1821 to 1827 she lived in great style, and made herself remarked for

her taste and her dress; she had a day, an hour, for receiving visits,
and ere long she had seated herself on the throne, occupied before her

by Madame la Vicomtesse de Beauseant, the Duchesse de Langeais, and
Madame Firmiani--who on her marriage with M. de Camps had resigned the

sceptre in favor of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, from whom Madame
d'Espard snatched it. The world knew nothing beyond this of the

private live of the Marquise d'Espard. She seemed likely to shine for
long on the Parisian horizon, like the sun near its setting, but which

will never set.
The Marquise was on terms of great intimacy with a duchess as famous

for her beauty as for her attachment to a prince just now in
banishment, but accustomed to play a leading part in every prospective

government. Madame d'Espard was also a friend of a foreign lady, with
whom a famous and very wily Russian diplomate was in the habit of

discussing public affairs. And then an antiquated countess, who was
accustomed to shuffle the cards for the great game of politics, had

adopted her in a maternal fashion. Thus, to any man of high ambitions,
Madame d'Espard was preparing a covert but very real influence to

follow the public and frivolous ascendency she now owed to fashion.
Her drawing-room was acquiring political individuality: "What do they

say at Madame d'Espard's?" "Are they against the measure in Madame
d'Espard's drawing-room?" were questions repeated by a sufficient

number of simpletons to give the flock of the faithful who surrounded
her the importance of a coterie. A few damaged politicians whose