indifference.

After various amorous adventures, bored by women of fashion of the
kind who are truly bores, and who plant too many thorny hedges around
happiness, he had married after a fashion, as we shall see, a certain
Madame Schontz, celebrated in the world of Fanny Beaupre, Susanne du
Val-Noble, Florine, Mariette, Jenny Cadine, etc. This world,--of which
one of our artists wittily remarked at the frantic moment of an opera
/galop/, "When one thinks that all /that/ is lodged and clothed and
lives well, what a fine idea it gives us of mankind!"--this world has
already irrupted elsewhere into this history of French manners and
customs of the nineteenth century; but to paint it with fidelity, the
historian should proportion the number of such personages to the
diverse endings of their strange careers, which terminate either in
poverty under its most hideous aspect, or by premature death often
self-inflicted, or by lucky marriages, occasionally by opulence.

Madame Schontz, known at first under the name of La Petite-Aurelie, to
distinguish her from one of her rivals far less clever than herself,
belongs to the highest class of those women whose social utility
cannot be questioned by the prefect of the Seine, nor by those who are
interested in the welfare of the city of Paris. Certainly the Rat,
accused of demolishing fortunes which frequently never existed, might
better be compared to a beaver. Without the Aspasias of the Notre-Dame
de Lorette quarter, far fewer houses would be built in Paris. Pioneers
in fresh stucco, they have gone, towed by speculation, along the
heights of Montmartre, pitching their tents in those solitudes of
carved free-stone, the like of which adorns the European streets of
Amsterdam, Milan, Stockholm, London, and Moscow, architectural steppes
where the wind rustles innumerable papers on which a void is divulged