"He seems to have found his wife a maid, but that's no fault of mine; and
Manon Baletti is the only person he ought to be grateful to. They tell me
that he has a pretty baby, and that he lives at the Louvre, while she has
another house in the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs."

"Yes, but he has supper with her every evening."

"It's an odd way of living."

"I assure you it answers capitally. Blondel regards his wife as his
mistress. He says that that keeps the flame of love alight, and that as
he never had a mistress worthy of being a wife, he is delighted to have a
wife worthy of being a mistress."

The next day I devoted entirely to Madame de Rumain, and we were occupied
with knotty questions till the evening. I left her well pleased. The
marriage of her daughter, Mdlle. Cotenfau, with M. de Polignac, which
took place five or six years later, was the result of our cabalistic
calculations.

The fair stocking-seller of the Rue des Prouveres, whom I had loved so
well, was no longer in Paris. She had gone off with a M. de Langlade, and
her husband was inconsolable. Camille was ill. Coralline had become the
titulary mistress of the Comte de la Marche, son of the Prince of Conti,
and the issue of this union was a son, whom I knew twenty years later. He
called himself the Chevalier de Montreal, and wore the cross of the
Knights of Malta. Several other girls I had known were widowed and in the
country, or had become inaccessible in other ways.

Such was the Paris of my day. The actors on its stage changed as rapidly