and, besides, was soon consoled elsewhere.
Cubières was now at the zenith of his glory. He
wrote verses with extreme facility, and inundated
the town with them; he got well noticed by the
critics, and well received by the court; was gay
and gallant; had money, fame, and drank deep
of the golden cup of courtly favour and red-
heeled popularity. He was the most unscrupulous
flatterer of the day; and the adulation
he poured out full-handed on others he received
back in kind, none the lessened by the transit.
If the need took him to write verses more warm
than modest, he ascribed them to M. de
Palmézeaux, into whom he one morning " doubled"
himself, and as Cubières-Palmézeaux, was the
smiling author of some of the most highly-
coloured poems afloat.

In the midst of these congenial triumphs
Cubières-Palmézeaux was startled by the death
of his master, Dorat. Cubières, who from
obedience had borrowed his mistress, from
admiration now borrowed his name, and henceforth
figured in the world of letters as Dorat-Cubières,
the disciple, friend, and literary legatee
of the Catullus of the eighteenth century.
So he went on his way a little longer, daintily
picking his steps among the royal roses of
Versailles, and heedless of all save pleasure and
success. And then the hoarse cannon suddenly
boomed across Paris, the tocsin rang, the people
uprose, and the Revolution broke out in all its
fierceness and fury. Dorat-Cubières was at the
house of Fanny de Beauharnais when the cannon
of the Bastille sounded. He threw down his
gilded lyre wreathed with artificial roses, and
rushed off to the scene of wrath and bloodshed.
Seizing the humour of the moment, and divining
what was coming, he instantly wrote an account
of the taking of the Bastille, as if he had been
there, signing himself "Michel de Cubières,
citizen and soldier."

Gods and goddesses, Chloes and Damons,
were now abandoned, and the Law was our tuneful
renegade's new mistress. The adulator of
Marie Antoinette was found " attaching an oak
leaf to the brow of Marat," and the most insipid
courtier of the day became the most furious
republican. Paris ridiculed him for his new
devotion, but Marat-Cubières—for he had again
changed godfathers as well as creeds—cared
nothing for such sneers; and soon the commune of
Paris rewarded him with a secretaryship as the
price of his turned coat. Cubières was inordinately
proud of his new employment, and made himself
conspicuous for his revolutionary zeal. When
the law was passed which removed all of noble
birth from any office under the state, the
Chevalier de Cubières—who, in the good old times,
had so often vaunted his aristocratic state and
condition—now strove with all his energy to
show that he was but a low-born commoner,
with not a drop of gentle blood in his veins.
His pleadings went for nothing; and Dorat-
Marat-Cubières-Palmézeaux was dismissed, to
carry his sighs and his numbers elsewhere. Before
his dismissal, though, he signed, in his
quality as secretary, the order for the arrest of
Madame Roland, between whom and himself
there had always been a smothered feud; and
he saved the life of a fugitive nobleman in a
generous and grandiose manner. It is pleasant
to find him doing one good thing.

He now went back to literature, dropping
the name both of Dorat and of Marat, and
retaining only that of Palmézeaux; still the
gallant courtier, the unblushing flatterer, beloved
by all women, respected by no man,
and finally deserted by the fickle world which
had once perfumed his path with incense.
Cubières died in 1820, so miserably poor that
he used to be seen, all in rags and wretchedness,
buying a pennyworth of " red eggs" at a
fruiterer's, and slinking off to eat them at a
wine-shop. This was the end of the friend and
pupil of the luxurious Dorat, of the favoured
lover of Joséphine's aunt, of the signer of the
decree which brought Madame Roland to the
scaffold.

Down at Montauban lived a pretty, graceful,
intelligent, but wholly uneducated little girl,
known simply by the name of Marie-Olympe.
Some said she was the daughter of Louis the
Fifteenth; but her blood was not quite so
"blue" as that. A certain nameless grisette,
and the grave, devout, austere Marquis de
Pompignan—the Catholic writer par excellence, the
inexorable enemy of Voltaire and the Encyclopédists,
whose morals were as irreproachable as
his lineage, and whose pride was as intense as
his piety—knew more about the birth of that
little Marie than King or Kaiser. The secret was
well kept, and never reached Voltaire's ears, else
the whole world would have rung with the
scandal. Not knowing how to read or write,
but quick and very promising, Marie-Olympe,
when fifteen, was married to a certain M. Aubry,
a retired traiteur, with sixty thousand pounds,
and old enough to be her grandfather. He had
the complaisance to die before the bridal year
was out, leaving Marie a very wealthy and
very lovely widow of sixteen, burning with
curiosity to turn her back on virtuous dull
Montauban, and see the world. And she saw
the world. She locked up the eating-house,
and carried her sixteen years and her flashing
black eyes to Paris, where she knew
that her money, her youth, and her beauty,
would be sure to give her a brilliant success.
She was right. Paris fêted and praised her without
stint, and gave her lovers without number.
The next fourteen years of her life were passed
in one round of dissipation and gallantry. But
the day came when the graces of sixteen were
lost in the deepening lines of thirty, and the love
which had blazed so fiercely now burnt itself
out like blackened straw. Olympe de Gouges
—for she, too, changed her name, and sank
the plebeian Aubry—hung on to the world of
gallantry as long as it would have her; when,
fairly abandoned, she gave herself up to the
world of literature. She wrote dramas and plays,
or rather she dictated them to her secretary—
for she could not write, even then; and she