"We should lose too much by ceasing to listen to our inspired
hostess!" and so he would incite Dinah's magnanimity to take pity at
last on her dear Abbe.

This bold manoeuvre, a device of the Sous-prefet's, was repeated with
so much skill that Dinah never suspected her slaves of escaping to the
prison yard, so to speak, of the cardtable; and they would leave her
one of the younger functionaries to harry.

One young landowner, and the dandy of Sancerre, fell away from Dinah's
good graces in consequence of some rash demonstrations. After
soliciting the honor of admission to this little circle, where he
flattered himself he could snatch the blossom from the constituted
authorities who guarded it, he was so unfortunate as to yawn in the
middle of an explanation Dinah was favoring him with--for the fourth
time, it is true--of the philosophy of Kant. Monsieur de la
Thaumassiere, the grandson of the historian of Le Berry, was
thenceforth regarded as a man entirely bereft of soul and brains.

The three devotees _en titre_ each submitted to these exorbitant
demands on their mind and attention, in hope of a crowning triumph,
when at last Dinah should become human; for neither of them was so
bold as to imagine that Dinah would give up her innocence as a wife
till she should have lost all her illusions. In 1826, when she was
surrounded by adorers, Dinah completed her twentieth year, and the
Abbe Duret kept her in a sort of fervid Catholicism; so her worshipers
had to be content to overwhelm her with little attentions and small
services, only too happy to be taken for the carpet-knights of this
sovereign lady, by strangers admitted to spend an evening or two at La