BY

MME. MILLET ROBINET.

_Orchard, kitchen-garden, stable, poultry-yard, bee-hive and hot-house,
have no further mysteries for Madame Colette Willy. They say, she
refused to divulge her secret for the destruction of mole-crickets to "a
great statesman, who prayed her on his knees."_

* * * * *

_Madame Colette Willy is in no way different from the description I have
just given of her. I am aware that certain folk, having met her in
society, insist upon making her very complex. A little more, and they
would have ascribed to her the tastes of the mustiest symbolists--and
one knows how far from pleasing are those Muses' robes, how odious the
yellow bandeaux above faces expressionless as eggs. Robes and bandeaux
are to-day relegated to drawers in the Capitol at Toulouse, from which
they will never be taken more, except when occasion calls for the
howling of official alexandrines in honor of M. Gaston Deschamps,
Jaurès, or Vercingétorix._

_Madame Colette Willy rises to-day on the world of Letters as the
poetess--at last!--who, with the tip of her slipper sends all the
painted, laureled, cothurnèd, lyre-carrying Muses--that, from Monselet
to Renan, have roused the aspirations of classes in Rhetoric--rolling,
from the top to the bottom of Parnassus._

_How charming she is thus--presenting her bull-dog and her cat with as