“‘Et quels mouchoirs portez-vous donc, Madame?’ exclaimed the Frenchman, half embarrassed and half amazed.
“‘Je ne porte que des mouchoirs à six-cents francs.’
“‘Et comment sont-ils donc faits, ces mouchoirs là?’ demanded the astonished Frenchman.
“‘Comme ce-ci,’ replied the lady, turning up her nose, and throwing a huddled-up, dirty, pocket-handkerchief on the table, which the Frenchman, either from delicacy or fear, did not dare to unravel.
“‘Ah! en vérité,”’ cried the gallant Parisian, turning away his head, ‘ils sont excessivement jolis.’
“When the same lady was afterwards told that she could perform the journey from Paris to Nice for less than a thousand francs, she remarked to her husband who had made the inquiry, ‘Oh, I dare say some people may do it even for less; but we always travel en grand seigneur.’”
“Pray,” said the Bostonian, “did that woman never claim any relationship to some European prince? They are seldom very extravagant unless they can prove themselves descended from a nobleman.”
“To be sure she did,” replied my friend; “not indeed to a prince, but to a duke, whose name is preserved in the history of his country. She told her friends and acquaintances that she only came to Europe to assist at the coronation of the Queen of England; which, she being a dame d’atour, could not very well be performed without her.”
“Oh, yes!” exclaimed the doctor; “I believe anything of your fashionable characters, except that they can live a month without Epsom salt or calomel.”
“I dare say she would have been just as humble and cringing in company of a British peer, as she was haughty and insolent with a poor Frenchman,” observed my friend. “She would have gone through all the regular stages of toad-eating, in order to procure, as a particular favour, a place in some corner of a room from which she might have peeped at the lovely person of her British Majesty.”