Cabinet minister.  Red ribbons and red rosettes shone from every corner of the room.  She had become one of the oligarchs of la haute Boheme, she had become one of the celebrities of Paris.  It would be tiresome to count the novels, poems, songs, that were dedicated to her, the portraits of her, painted or sculptured, that appeared at the Mirlitons or the Palais de l’Industrie.  Numberless were the partis who asked her to marry them (I know one, at least, who has returned to the charge again and again), but she only laughed, and vowed she would never marry.  I don’t say that she has never had her fancies, her experiences; but she has consistently scoffed at marriage.  At any rate, she has never affected the least repentance for what some people would call her ‘fault.’  Her ideas of right and wrong have undergone very little modification.  She was deceived in her estimate of the character of Ernest Mayer, if you please; but she would indignantly deny that there was anything sinful, anything to be ashamed of, in her relations with him.  And if, by reason of them, she at one time suffered a good deal of pain, I am sure she accounts Camille an exceeding great compensation.  That Camille is her child she would scorn to make a secret.  She has scorned to assume the conciliatory title of Madame.  As plain Mademoiselle, with a daughter, you must take her or leave her.  And, somehow, all this has not seemed to make the faintest difference to her clientele, not even to the primmest of the English.  I can’t think of one of them who did not treat her with deference, like her, and recommend her house.

But her house they need recommend no more, for she has sold it.  Last spring, when I was in Paris, she told me she was about to do so.  ’Ouf!  I have lived with my nose to the grindstone long enough.  I am going to “retire."’ What money she had saved from season to season, she explained, she had entrusted to her friend Baron C——­for speculation.  ’He is a wizard, and so I am a rich woman.  I shall have an income of something like three thousand pounds, mon cher!  Oh, we will roll in it.  I have had ten bad years—­ten hateful years.  You don’t know how I have hated it all, this business, this drudgery, this cut-and-dried, methodical existence—­moi, enfant de Boheme!  But, enfin, it was obligatory.  Now we will change all that.  Nous reviendrons a nos premieres amours.  I shall have ten good years—­ten years of barefaced pleasure.  Then—­I will range myself—­perhaps.  There is the darlingest little house for sale, a sort of chalet, built of red brick, with pointed windows and things, in the Rue de Lisbonne.  I shall buy it—­furnish it—­decorate it.  Oh, you will see.  I shall have my carriage, I shall have toilets, I shall entertain, I shall give dinners—­olala!  No more boarders, no more bores, cares, responsibilities.  Only my friends and—­life!  I feel like one emerging from ten years in the galleys, ten years of penal servitude.  To the Pension Childe—­bonsoir!’