Manon's life was not always darkened by images of fearful punishments and famished crowds, nor did she perpetually pore over the Greek classics and modern encyclopædists. She sometimes went to Christmas and birthday gatherings given by one or other of her many relatives, and would draw a half-ironical picture of herself to her friend as gliding along a room in floating pink draperies trimmed with roses. But her gravity did not resist the infection of pleasure when at a ball, and she seems to have footed it on "the light fantastic toe" with the merriest madcap of them all. At other times, although but rarely, she and her mother would attend what we should now call "Musical At-Homes." At the house of a certain Madame Lépine, Manon got a glimpse of some of the lesser littérateurs of Paris, who, she says, used to meet in a dingy room, up three flights of stairs, and lit up by tallow candles in dirty brass candlesticks, would recite their verses or play their compositions. But this glimpse of literary society—third-rate it is true—had no attraction for Marie, who, although born and bred in Paris, always preferred a country to a town