Concealing my agitation under a strain of light conversation, "Mademoiselle," I said, in answer to a question, "music is to-day the necessity of the universe. France is commissioned to amuse the world. Suppress our theatre, opera, Paris, and a settled melancholy pervades the human family. You have no idea of the ennui that desolates the hemispheres.
"Occasionally Paris enlivens the two Indias by dethroning a king. Once Calcutta was in extremis, it was dying of the blues; the East India company was rich but not amusing; with all its treasure it could not buy one smile for Calcutta, so Paris sent Robert le Diable, La Muette de Portici, a drama or two of Hugo and Dumas. Calcutta became convalescent and recovered. Its neighbor, Chandernagore, scarcely existed then, but in 1842, when I left the Isle de Bourbon, La Favorita was announced; it planted roses in the cheeks of the jaundiced inhabitants, and Madras, possessed by the spleen, was exorcised by William Tell.
"Whenever a tropical city is conscious of approaching decline, she always stretches her hands beseechingly to Paris, who responds with music, books, newspapers; and her patient springs into new life.
"Paris does not seem to be aware of her influences. She detracts from herself; says she is not the Paris of yesterday, the Paris of the great century; that her influence is gone, she is in the condition of the Lower Empire.
"She builds eighty leagues of fortifications to sustain the siege of Mahomet II. She weeps over her downfall and accuses Heaven of denying to her children of '44 the genius and talents that characterized the statesmen and poets of her past.
"But happily the universe does not coincide with Paris; go ask it; having just come from there, I know it."
Indulging my traveller's extravagancies laughingly, to the amusement of my fair companion, she said:
"Truly your philosophy is of the happy school, and the burden of life must be very light when it is so lightly borne."
"You must know, my dear Roger," said the Duchess, feigning commiseration, "that my young cousin, Mlle. de Chateaudun, is pitiably unhappy, and you and I can weep over her lot in chorus with orchestral accompaniment; poor child! she is the richest heiress in Paris."
"How wide you are from the mark!" said Irene, with a charming look of annoyance in the brightest eye that ever dazzled the sober senses of man; "it is not an axiom that wealth is happiness. The poor spread such a report, but the rich know it to be false."