two and two together, to writers, who foresee and tell all that they
see; accustomed also to the ways of certain political personages, who
watched one another in her house, and profited by all admissions,
Florine presented in her own person a mixture of devil and angel,
which made her peculiarly fitted to receive these roues. They
delighted in her cool self-possession; her anomalies of mind and heart
entertained them prodigiously. Her house, enriched by gallant
tributes, displayed the exaggerated magnificence of women who, caring
little about the cost of things, care only for the things themselves,
and give them the value of their own caprices,--women who will break a
fan or a smelling-bottle fit for queens in a moment of passion, and
scream with rage if a servant breaks a ten-franc saucer from which
their poodle drinks.

Florine's dining-room, filled with her most distinguished offerings,
will give a fair idea of this pell-mell of regal and fantastic luxury.
Throughout, even on the ceilings, it was panelled in oak, picked out,
here and there, by dead-gold lines. These panels were framed in relief
with figures of children playing with fantastic animals, among which
the light danced and floated, touching here a sketch by Bixiou, that
maker of caricatures, there the cast of an angel holding a vessel of
holy water (presented by Francois Souchet), farther on a coquettish
painting of Joseph Bridau, a gloomy picture of a Spanish alchemist by
Hippolyte Schinner, an autograph of Lord Byron to Lady Caroline Lamb,
framed in carved ebony, while, hanging opposite as a species of
pendant, was a letter from Napoleon to Josephine. All these things
were placed about without the slightest symmetry, but with almost
imperceptible art. On the chimney-piece, of exquisitely carved oak,
there was nothing except a strange, evidently Florentine, ivory
statuette attributed to Michael Angelo, representing Pan discovering a