would probably have answered that he was a member of the English Jockey
Club. For he held that that distinction conferred greater honour upon him
than the accident of his birth, which enabled him to claim for
grandfather the first Count de Vasselot, one of Murat's aides-de-camp, a
brilliant, dashing cavalry officer, a boyhood's friend of the great
Napoleon. Lory de Vasselot was, moreover, a cavalry officer himself, but
had not taken part in any of the enterprises of an emperor who held that
to govern Frenchmen it is necessary to provide them with a war every four
years.

"Bon Dieu!" he told his friends, "I did not sleep for two nights after I
was elected to that great club."

Lory de Vasselot, moreover, did his best to live up to his position. He
never, for instance, had his clothes made in Paris. His very gloves came
from a little shop in Newmarket, where only the seamiest and clumsiest of
hand-coverings are provided, and horn buttons are a _sine qua non_.

To desire to be mistaken for an Englishman is a sure sign that you belong
to the very best Parisian set, and Lory de Vasselot's position was an
enviable one, for so long as he kept his hat on and stood quite still and
did not speak, he might easily have been some one connected with the
British turf. It must, of course, be understood that the similitude of de
Vasselot's desire was only an outward one. We all think that every other
nation would fain be English, but as all other countries have a like
pitying contempt for us, there is perhaps no harm done. And it is to be
presumed that if some candid friend were to tell de Vasselot that the
moment he uncovered his hair, or opened his lips, or made a single
movement, he was hopelessly and unmistakably French from top to toe, he
would not have been sorely distressed.