posts as executioner of the Tower of London or the Grève of Paris, there
was honour and satisfaction in the office. A royal master knew when he was
well served. Henry III. stood by, in his chateau of Blois, to see, not
only the heads severed from the dead bodies of the Duke and Cardinal de
Guise, but their _flesh cut into small pieces_, preparatory to being
burned, and the ashes scattered to the winds. "His majesty," says an
eyewitness, "stood in a pool of blood to witness the hacking of the
bodies."

This Italian _gusto_ for the smell of blood, appears to have been
introduced into the palaces of France from those of Italy by alliance with
the Medici--those ennobled pawnbrokers of the middle ages, whose _parvenu_
taste engendered the fantastic gilding of the _renaissance_, which they
naturalized in the Tuileries and at Fontainbleau, in common with the
stiletto and acqua tofana of their poisoners, and the fatalism of their
judicial astrology.

But enough of Catharine de Medicis and her sanguinary son--enough of Henry
Tudor and his savage daughters--enough of the monstrous professions
flourishing in their age of monstrosities. And turn we for relief to the
exquisite vocation completing the antithesis--the vocation whose execution
is that of _pas de zéphyrs_, and the tortures of whose infliction are the
tortures of the tender heart!

The calling of the _danseuse_, we repeat, is among the most lucrative of
modern times, and nearly the most influential. The names of Taglioni and
Elssler are as European, nay, as universal, as those of Wellington and
Talleyrand-Metternich or Thiers; and modern statesmanship and modern
diplomacy show pale beside the Machiavelism of the _coulisses_.