The Eagles then patronized Mrs. Rawdon, took her to live with her at

her own house at Paris, quarrelled with the ambassador's wife because

she would not receive her protegee, and did all that lay in woman's

power to keep Becky straight in the paths of virtue and good repute.

Becky was very respectable and orderly at first, but the life of

humdrum virtue grew utterly tedious to her before long. It was the

same routine every day, the same dulness and comfort, the same drive

over the same stupid Bois de Boulogne, the same company of an evening,

the same Blair's Sermon of a Sunday night--the same opera always being

acted over and over again; Becky was dying of weariness, when, luckily

for her, young Mr. Eagles came from Cambridge, and his mother, seeing

the impression which her little friend made upon him, straightway gave

Becky warning.

Then she tried keeping house with a female friend; then the double

menage began to quarrel and get into debt. Then she determined upon a

boarding-house existence and lived for some time at that famous mansion

kept by Madame de Saint Amour, in the Rue Royale, at Paris, where she

began exercising her graces and fascinations upon the shabby dandies

and fly-blown beauties who frequented her landlady's salons. Becky

loved society and, indeed, could no more exist without it than an

opium-eater without his dram, and she was happy enough at the period of

her boarding-house life. "The women here are as amusing as those in

May Fair," she told an old London friend who met her, "only, their

dresses are not quite so fresh. The men wear cleaned gloves, and are

sad rogues, certainly, but they are not worse than Jack This and Tom

That. The mistress of the house is a little vulgar, but I don't think

she is so vulgar as Lady ------" and here she named the name of a great

leader of fashion that I would die rather than reveal. In fact, when

you saw Madame de Saint Amour's rooms lighted up of a night, men with

plaques and cordons at the ecarte tables, and the women at a little

distance, you might fancy yourself for a while in good society, and

that Madame was a real Countess. Many people did so fancy, and Becky

was for a while one of the most dashing ladies of the Countess's salons.

But it is probable that her old creditors of 1815 found her out and

caused her to leave Paris, for the poor little woman was forced to fly

from the city rather suddenly, and went thence to Brussels.

How well she remembered the place! She grinned as she looked up at the

little entresol which she had occupied, and thought of the Bareacres

family, bawling for horses and flight, as their carriage stood in the

porte-cochere of the hotel. She went to Waterloo and to Laeken, where

George Osborne's monument much struck her. She made a little sketch of

it. "That poor Cupid!" she said; "how dreadfully he was in love with

me, and what a fool he was! I wonder whether little Emmy is alive. It

was a good little creature; and that fat brother of hers. I have his

funny fat picture still among my papers. They were kind simple people."




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