"A second Pasta!" cried Château-Renaud, entering the stalls immediately on the descent of the curtain. "Heard you ever such a magnificent contralto?"
"Saw you ever such a magnificent bust?" asked Beauchamp.
"Were it not for a few manifest impossibilities," thoughtfully remarked Debray, "I should swear that this same angelic Louise d'Armilly was no other than a certain very beautiful, very eccentric and very talented young lady whom we all once knew as a star of Parisian fashion, and who, the last time she was in this house, sat in the same loge where now sit the African generals."
"Whom can you mean, Debray?" cried Beauchamp.
"A certain haughty young lady, who was to have married an Italian Prince, but, on the night of the bridal, in the midst of the festivities, the house being thronged with guests, and even while the contract was receiving the signatures, the Prince was arrested as an escaped galley-slave, and at his trial proved to be the illegitimate son of the bride's mother and a certain high legal functionary, the Procureur du Roi, now at Charenton, through whose burning zeal for justice the horrible discovery transpired."
"Ha!" exclaimed Château-Renaud. "You cannot mean Eugénie Danglars, daughter of the bankrupt baron, whom our unhappy friend Morcerf was once to have wed?"
"The very same," quietly rejoined the Secretary; "but this lady cannot be Mlle. Danglars, I say absolutely, for many sufficient reasons," he quickly added; then, as if to turn the conversation, he hastily remarked: "Ah! there are M. Dantès and M. Lamartine, as usual, together."
"M. Dantès!" exclaimed the Count, in surprise, looking around. "Impossible!"
"And yet most true," observed Beauchamp; "in the third loge from the Minister's to the right. What a wonderful resemblance there is between those men--the poet and the Deputy! One would suppose them brothers. The same tall and elegant figure, the same white and capacious brow, the same dark, blazing eye, the same raven hair, and, above all, the same most unearthly and spiritual pallor of complexion."
"No wonder M. Dantès is pale," said the Count. "Have you not heard of the occurrence of this evening in the Chamber? M. Dantès was in the midst of one of his powerful harangues against the Government, when suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he stopped--coughed violently several times, and pressed his handkerchief to his mouth; then taking a small vial from his vest pocket, he placed it to his lips, and instantaneously, as if new life had entered him, proceeded more eloquently than ever to the conclusion of his speech."
"I heard something of this," said Beauchamp.