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 doubtful elegance 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 severe system 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,