Mad. Demidoff called for her diamonds a day or two after her ball, to show a new aigrette to a lady of her acquaintance. Her maid, on opening the box, and missing this very bijou, fell into fits. She was taxed with either dishonesty or carelessness, as she had the care of her mistress’s jewels, and in defending herself, said that she suspected Madame (I forget the name), a German Countess, who was the intimate friend of Mad. D.,—did not live in the house, but dined there almost every day. Her grounds for this suspicion were that this lady had asked her to show the diamonds a very few days before, and had examined them narrowly. Mad. D. silenced her, and continued to have some suspicion she was the guilty person. The next time she saw her friend, she mentioned what the maid had said as to having shown them, which this lady positively denied. Upon this denial, the maid was so convinced of her guilt, that she insisted on a police-officer searching the house, which he did next morning, and found the aigrette in a cup of aqua fortis, where it had been left to dissolve the setting. She was of course immediately taken to prison. This is a mesquin mean story to return for your magnificent anecdote, but is now the chief subject of conversation.
Paris, Jan., 1806.
Kitty is, I believe, settled. Her plausible manner of abusing us, and of telling her own story, is such that the hotel-keeper here, and all my tradespeople, think her a very ill-used person; and trifling as is this prejudice against me, I have been accustomed to being so much considered a good kind of person at least, that it frets me. I believe she has gone about to everybody I know, of every rank; for all have said to me with an air of coldness and mystery, ‘Quoi, votre femme-de-chambre vous quitte—c’est bien extraordinaire. Elle vous aimait tant. Elle vous a servie si long temps.’ Antoine was as busy for her at the prefecture as her counsel. I am sorry I am awakened from my beau rêve about the good qualities of servants, to two truths—one, that a servant who has lived with you ten years, will prefer to you the partner who has arrived yesterday; the next, that although they may be at the point of the sword together, they will always unite against you. The expression of the ancient, ‘humble friends,’ was not half so just as that of the modern antique, the old Duke of Queensberry, whom I heard say, ‘They are spies upon you, whom you pay yourself.’ I am afraid the ancient philosopher had not so many to attend on him as ‘old Q.,’ and was not so good a judge.
TO THE SAME.
Paris, Feb., 1806.
I went yesterday with Mr. S. to Mons. ——, an artist, to see some very fine drawings. They are chiefly copies from Raphael, and one of the ‘Last Supper,’ of Leonardo da Vinci, which is beautiful. He values them, I believe, too highly, as he asks a hundred louis for this last, and the others in proportion. He uses no colours but sepia, a soupçon of yellow, the same of blue, and some white body colour. From thence I returned to dine at Mrs. F——’s with Mrs. —— and Mr. Crispy. Mrs. ——, with a volubility seldom equalled, gave me all the details possible of her domestic management, tending to prove that she was at once as fine a lady and as good a housekeeper as any in Paris—that she lived magnificently, had a great establishment, and spent a very large fortune with the highest degree of taste and economy united. Amongst other details, she was so minute as to tell me that on the last great dinner she gave to twenty-four persons, she saw 134 pounds of beef cut up merely for soup and sauces. I was a little astonished at this aldermanic puff, and everybody else showed symptoms of surprise, the greater in proportion to their knowledge of housekeeping. I forgot to say the little baronet, our former fellow-lodger, also dined there; whiskers and eyebrows were all japanned and blackened like your boots, and a light couleur de rose on his cheeks, and his figure set up as if he had got a pair of Coutant’s new corsets; and after we left the room, he showed love-letters to the gentlemen. It is a great comfort to the poor husbands whose wives expect constancy and all their affections, that gallantry seems to have got into such hands as it has of late. I declare it seems to me as if that vice had seen its best days, and was fallen into complete disrepute. I hope it will not rise again till Fred’s character is formed; for though some escape with undiminished sensibility and refinement, I think the dispositions of nine men out of ten are miserably injured by it for all the rest of their lives.
I laughed out loud at your description of the Pétillant; and I must say I have a generosity of soul about a good story, which makes me uneasy at having no one to tell it to. I feel about it like a hospitable epicure about a delicacy, quite uneasy, if I must feast on it alone.