Mademoiselle de Camargo thus finished her history. "Well, my dear philosopher," said Helvetius to Duclos, in descending the steps, "you have just read a book that is somewhat curious."—"A bad book," answered Duclos, "but such books are always interesting."
In April, 1770, the news spread that Mademoiselle de Camargo had just died a good catholic. "This created a great surprise," says a journal of the day, "in the republic of letters, for she was supposed to have been dead twenty years." Her last admirer and her last friend, to whom she had bequeathed her dogs and her cats, had caused her body to be interred with a magnificence unexampled at the opera. "All the world," says Grimm, "admired that white pall, the symbol of chastity, that all unmarried persons are entitled to in their funeral ceremony."
MY NOVEL:
OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.[7]
BY PISISTRATUS CAXTON.
BOOK IX.—INITIAL CHAPTER.
Now that I am fairly in the heart of my story, these preliminary chapters must shrink into comparatively small dimensions, and not encroach upon the space required by the various personages whose acquaintance I have picked up here and there, and who are now all crowding upon me like poor relations to whom one has unadvisedly given a general invitation, and who descend upon one simultaneously about Christmas time. Where they are to be stowed, and what is to become of them all, heaven knows; in the meanwhile, the reader will have already observed that the Caxton family themselves are turned out of their own rooms, sent a-packing, in order to make way for the new comers.