‘Yes! in the boudoir. And why not? A battlefield makes a famous place to dine in. They wished to give a very special and particular supper to Señor Don Juan, and it seemed better worthy of his exploits to give it on the scene of his former triumphs, where fond memories bloom instead of orange-blossoms. A pretty notion, at once tender and sad! ’Twas no victims’ ball! it was a victims’ supper-party!’

‘And Don Juan?’ she asked in the tone of Orgon, in the play, saying: ‘And Tartufe?’

‘Don Juan took it in excellent part, and made an excellent supper,

as the poet sings—in the person of someone you know very well indeed—none other than the Comte Jules-Amédée-Hector de Ravila de Ravilès.’

‘Comte de Ravilès! Why, yes! He was a Don Juan.…’

So saying, the pious lady, case-hardened in her narrow bigotry as she was, and long past the age of day-dreams, lapsed then and there into a fond reverie of which Comte Jules-Amédée was the theme—that man of the old Don Juan breed, to which God has not indeed given ‘all the world and glory thereof’, but has suffered the Devil to do it for Him.

II

What I had just told the aged Marquise Guy de Ruy was the unvarnished truth. Hardly three days had elapsed since a dozen ladies of the virtuous Faubourg Saint-Germain (rest them easy, I will never damage their noble names!), who, every one, the whole dozen, if we are to believe the cackling dowagers of the quarter, had been ‘on the best of good terms’ (a really charming old-fashioned locution) with the Comte Ravila de Ravilès, had conceived the idea of offering him a supper—he being the only male guest—in pious memory of…well! they did not say of what. A bold thing to do, but women, while timid individually, are as bold as brass when banded together. Probably not one of the whole party would have ventured to invite the comte to a tête-à-tête supper at her own house; but all together, each backing up the other, they feared not to weave a chain, like mesmerists round their mystic tub, round this magnetic and most compromising individual, the Comte de Ravila de Ravilès.…

‘What a name!’

‘A providential name, madame.’

The Comte de Ravila de Ravilès, who, by the by, had always lived up to his high-sounding and picturesque title, was the perfect incarnation of all the long line of Lovelaces Romance and History tell of, and even the old Marquise Guy de Ruy—a discontented old lady, with light-blue eyes, cold and keen, but not so cold as her heart, or so keen as her tongue—allowed that in these times, when women and women’s concerns grow day by day less important, if there was any one who could recall Don Juan, it must surely be he! Unfortunately it was Don Juan in the Fifth Act. The witty Prince de Ligne said he could not make himself believe Alcibiades ever grew to be fifty; and here again the Comte de Ravila was to be a true Alcibiades to the end of the chapter. Like d’Orsay, a dandy hewn out of the marble of Michael Angelo, who was the handsomest of men down to his last hour, Ravila had possessed the good looks especially belonging to the Don Juan breed—that mysterious race which does not proceed from father to son, like other races, but appears here and there at recurring intervals in the families of mankind.

His beauty was beyond dispute—of the gay, arrogant, imperial sort, Juanesque in fact (the word is a picture, and makes description heedless); and—had he made an unholy bargain with the Devil?—it was his still.…Only, God was beginning to exact His penalty; life’s cruel tiger-claws already seamed that ‘front divine’, crowned with the roses of so many kisses, and on his wide and wicked temples appeared the first white hairs that proclaim the impending invasion of the barbarian hosts and the fall of the empire.…He