of things as a public appraiser. To see her lying on her sofa, like a
young bride, fresh and white, holding her part in her hand and
learning it, you would have thought her a child of sixteen, ingenuous,
ignorant, and weak, with no other artifice about her but her
innocence. Let a creditor contrive to enter, and she was up like a
startled fawn, and swearing a good round oath.

"Hey! my good fellow; your insolence is too dear an interest on the
money I owe you," she would say. "I am sick of seeing you. Send the
sheriff here; I'd prefer him to your silly face."

Florine gave charming dinners, concerts, and well-attended soirees,
where play ran high. Her female friends were all handsome; no old
woman had ever appeared within her precincts. She was not jealous; in
fact, she would have thought jealousy an admission of inferiority. She
had known Coralie and La Torpille in their lifetimes, and now knew
Tullia, Euphrasie, Aquilina, Madame du Val-Noble, Mariette,--those
women who pass through Paris like gossamer through the atmosphere,
without our knowing where they go nor whence they came; to-day queens,
to-morrow slaves. She also knew the actresses, her rivals, and all the
prima-donnas; in short, that whole exceptional feminine society, so
kindly, so graceful in its easy "sans-souci," which absorbs into its
own Bohemian life all who allow themselves to be caught in the frantic
whirl of its gay spirits, its eager abandonment, and its contemptuous
indifference to the future.

Though this Bohemian life displayed itself in her house in tumultuous
disorder, amid the laughter of artists of every description, the queen
of the revels had ten fingers on which she knew better how to count
than any of her guests. In that house secret saturnalias of literature