their hearts on horse-flesh, but only for the good of the country, not
for the paltry satisfactions of a betting man. If you had a stud farm
on your property and could raise a thousand or twelve hundred horses,
and if all the horses of France and of Navarre could enter into one
great solemn competition, it would be fine; but you buy animals as the
managers of theatres trade in artists; you degrade an institution to a
gambling game; you make a Bourse of legs, as you make a Bourse of
stocks. It is unworthy. Don't you spend sixty thousand francs
sometimes merely to read in the newspapers: 'Lelia, belonging to
Monsieur de Rochefide beat by a length Fleur-de-Genet the property of
Monsieur le Duc de Rhetore'? You had much better give that money to
poets, who would carry you in prose and verse to immortality, like the
late Montyon."

By dint of being prodded, the marquis was brought to see the
hollowness of the turf; he realized that economy of sixty thousand
francs; and the next year Madame Schontz remarked to him,--

"I don't cost you anything now, Arthur."

Many rich men envied the marquis and endeavored to entice Madame
Schontz away from him, but like the Russian prince they wasted their
old age.

"Listen to me," she said to Finot, now become immensely rich. "I am
certain that Rochefide would forgive me a little passion if I fell in
love with any one, but one doesn't leave a marquis with a kind heart
like that for a /parvenu/ like you. You couldn't keep me in the
position in which Arthur has placed me; he has made me half a wife and
a lady, and that's more than you could do even if you married me."