had announced the death of an old aunt, whose money she is waiting for to
renew the furniture in her house. And, on the contrary, when Madame D---
announces that Madame E-----'s little son has the whooping-cough, at
once, without transition, by a change of expression that would make the
fortune of an actress, the lady of the house puts on an air of
consternation, as if the cholera had broken out the night before in the
Halles quarter.

Amedee is launched, I repeat it. He is still a little green and will
become the dupe, for a long time, of all the shams, grimaces, acting, and
false smiles, which cover so many artificial teeth. At first sight all
is elegance, harmony, and delicacy. Since Amedee does not know that the
Princess Krazinska's celebrated head of hair was cut from the heads of
the Breton girls, how could he suspect that the austere defender of the
clergy, M. Lemarguillier, had been gravely compromised in a love affair,
and had thrown himself at the feet of the chief of police, exclaiming,
"Do not ruin me!" When the king of society is announced, the young Duc
de la Tour-Prends-Garde, whose one ancestor was at the battle of the
bridge, and who is just now introducing a new style in trousers, Amedee
could not suspect that the favorite amusement of this fashionable rake
consisted in drinking in the morning upon an empty stomach, with his
coachman, at a grog-shop on the corner. When the pretty Baroness des
Nenuphars blushed up to her ears because someone spoke the word "tea-
spoon" before her, and she considered it to be an unwarrantable
indelicacy--nobody knows why--it is assuredly not our young friend who
will suspect that, in order to pay the gambling debts of her third lover,
this modest person had just sold secretly her family jewels.

Rest assured Amedee will lose all these illusions in time. The day will
come when he will not take in earnest this grand comedy in white cravats.