haphazard on books new or old, and could expose the defects of a work
with a cruelly graceful wit. The simplest thing she said was accepted
by an admiring crowd as a fetfah of the Sultan by the Turks. She thus
dazzled shallow persons; as to deeper minds, her natural tact enabled
her to discern them, and for them she put forth so much fascination
that, under cover of her charms, she escaped their scrutiny. This
enchanting veneer covered a careless heart; the opinion--common to
many young girls--that no one else dwelt in a sphere so lofty as to be
able to understand the merits of her soul; and a pride based no less
on her birth than on her beauty. In the absence of the overwhelming
sentiment which, sooner or later, works havoc in a woman's heart, she
spent her young ardor in an immoderate love of distinctions, and
expressed the deepest contempt for persons of inferior birth.
Supremely impertinent to all newly-created nobility, she made every
effort to get her parents recognized as equals by the most illustrious
families of the Saint-Germain quarter.

These sentiments had not escaped the observing eye of Monsieur de
Fontaine, who more than once, when his two elder girls were married,
had smarted under Emilie's sarcasm. Logical readers will be surprised
to see the old Royalist bestowing his eldest daughter on a
Receiver-General, possessed, indeed, of some old hereditary estates, but
whose name was not preceded by the little word to which the throne owed
so many partisans, and his second to a magistrate too lately Baronified
to obscure the fact that his father had sold firewood. This noteworthy
change in the ideas of a noble on the verge of his sixtieth year--an
age when men rarely renounce their convictions--was due not merely to
his unfortunate residence in the modern Babylon, where, sooner or
later, country folks all get their corners rubbed down; the Comte de
Fontaine's new political conscience was also a result of the King's