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"I, a Penelope in morals, shall undo every evening the web of reformation you have "assisted me to weave in the morning."

The chevalier was about to answer in the same playful stile, when a crowd of visitors was announced; and the chevalier, as was usual with him on such occasions, took his leave.

There is an influenza in fashion which even the sobriety of judgment cannot resist; and if once the fantastic goddess reflects some favourite in her flattering mirror, the giddy multitude rushes forward on the tip-toe of expectation to behold, to admire, and to approve. The faith of the many reposes on the doctrine of the few; and the faintest respiration of fame receives a deathless echo from the babbling tongue of awakened popularity.

A week had only elapsed from the period of Imogen's introduction at court, and that notoriety which even the secret ambition of the Novice of St. Dominick had panted to possess was now all her own.

That interesting, that piquant charm which breathed around her person; those native and soul-born graces, more beautiful than even beauty itself; the splendor of her rank and fortune, and the brilliancy of her talents and acquirements, were at least sufficiently attractive to render her the object of general admiration, and to have given her a decided consequence in the high sphere in which she moved. But they carried not with them the magic influence to render her the object of tonish popularity, the cynosure of fashion, and the model of imitative inferiority. For, with every requisite to obtain celebrity, Imogen, like many others, was chiefly indebted for its possession to a whimsical coincidence of circumstances, or to the selflove of those in whose hands the power of bestowing it was vested. The marquis de Sancy, flattered by the pleasure with which she hung upon his brilliant conversation, and the compliments which, in the unmodified ardor of her manner, she had paid

to his talents, and perhaps not indifferent to the charms of her person and genius, cried her up every where as a wit of the first order. The duke de Montmorency, whose sated heart found in her that novelty which alone had now the power to awaken a thrill on its languid pulse, established every where the fame of her beauty. And the king (to whom the duchess de Guise, in the kind policy of her friendship, had repeated many of those enthusiastic and rapturous expressions of admiration with which Imogen had dwelt on the character, the virtues, and talents, of her accomplished sovereign) spoke of her amiable originality, even in the presence of the fair Gabrielle.

In a short time, therefore, the hotel de St. Dorval became the constant resort of all that was most distinguished in Paris for rank, talents, or fashion. The gaiety, the freedom that reigned there; the novel style of the entertainments, over which the Graces themselves seemed to preside;

where Epicurus might have reveled, and Plato have enjoyed the feast of reason; together with the spell of fascination that lurked in the celebrity of its young and charming mistress; all contributed to render it the temple of refined and elegant pleasure, of rational as well as of fashionable amusement: while the constant society of madame de Rosemont afforded to the unrestrained conduct of the gay and volatile heiress a matronly sanction, and her engagements with the chevalier de Sorville an honourable protection and an inviolable safeguard.

The nature of her connection with her amiable guardian had soon become a topic of fashionable publicity and discussion; and as the disparity of their years, and apparently of their dispositions, rendered it generally believed their projected union was the result of family prudence or parental policy, it was a circumstance that rather allured than distanced the homage of gallantry; and the youth and unguard

ed vivacity of its object hourly added to the number of its votarists by whom she was surrounded: while her enthusiastic admiration of genius and talents, her profuse and boundless liberality to those who possessed them, (many of whom made professional claims to her taste and generosity,) soon obtained her the reputation of being the most distinguished patroness of literature and literary persons in Paris, and rendered her house equally the resort of prosperous merit and indigent genius.

De Servin, whose extraordinary and versatile talents, all wonderful as they really were, were still exceeded by the number and extent of his evil qualities; who has been characterized by cotemporary writers as a miracle of genius and a monster of vice, and who united, in an eminent degree, all that adorns human nature to all that depraves it, found in his dazzling abilities an irrésistible lure to the favour of the young lady de St. Dorval, who saw not beneath the most brilliant assemblage