'And how was the little one looking?'
'Divine as usual.'
'Bon! did you see anything of Madame la Duchesse de Charost?'
'The beautiful divorced—no.'
'Yet you were all winter in Paris!'
'I was studying, my dear friend.'
'Studying—you?'
'Studying practically the interior economy of your French prisons.'
'Tête Dieu! I don't understand you—but your life in Paris seems to have been very circumscribed.'
'Because it was confined to an upper chamber of the Bastille.'