she happened to receive one.

When one thinks of what the beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse had
been under the Restoration,--one of the queens of Paris, a dazzling
queen, whose luxurious existence equalled that of the richest women of
fashion in London,--there was something touching in the sight of her
in that humble little abode in the rue de Miromesnil, a few steps away
from her splendid mansion, which no amount of fortune had enabled her
to keep, and which the hammer of speculators has since demolished. The
woman who thought she was scarcely well served by thirty servants, who
possessed the most beautiful reception-rooms in all Paris, and the
loveliest little private apartments, and who made them the scene of
such delightful fetes, now lived in a small apartment of five rooms,
--an antechamber, dining-room, salon, one bed-chamber, and a
dressing-room, with two women-servants only.

"Ah! she is devoted to her son," said that clever creature, Madame
d'Espard, "and devoted without ostentation; she is happy. Who would
ever have believed so frivolous a woman was capable of such persistent
resolution! Our good archbishop has, consequently, greatly encouraged
her; he is most kind to her, and has just induced the old Comtesse de
Cinq-Cygne to pay her a visit."

Let us admit a truth! One must be a queen to know how to abdicate, and
to descend with dignity from a lofty position which is never wholly
lost. Those only who have an inner consciousness of being nothing in
themselves, show regrets in falling, or struggle, murmuring, to return
to a past which can never return,--a fact of which they themselves are
well aware. Compelled to do without the choice exotics in the midst of
which she had lived, and which set off so charmingly her whole being