have a foreign attendant—a French, or
Swiss, or German lady's-maid. I will take
Mademoiselle Batiste, warranted from Paris,
as a sample.

When I say warranted from Paris, I mean
what the word " warranted " is generally
found to mean—not at all like what it
professes to be. Mademoiselle Batiste says she
is from Paris; but she does not bear the
slightest resemblance to the pert, sprightly,
coquettish, tasteful, merry creation in a
cunning cap, a dress closed to the neck, a
plaited silk apron and shiny shoes, that a
Parisian lady's-maid generally is. My
private impression is that she is a native of
some distressingly lugubrious provincial town
in the midi of France—Aigues Mortes,
perchance—whence she has been sent, for our
sins, to England, to make us mournful. She
is a most dolorous Abigail; a lachrymose,
grumbling, doleant, miserable waiting woman.
When she is old (she is in the thirties, now,) she
will take snuff and keep a poodle on some fifth
floor in the Marais, I am sure. Whether she
has been disappointed in love, or her relations
were guillotined during the great revolution;
whether she was born on the eve of St. Swithin,
or like Apollodorus, she nourishes
scorpions in her breast, I know not, but she
is a very grievous woman—a female knight
of the rueful countenance. If you fail to
please her, she grumbles; if you remonstrate
with her, she cries. What are you to do
with a woman, whose clouds always end
in rain, unless you have Patience for an
umbrella? In person. Mademoiselle Batiste
is tall; in compass wofully lean and
attenuated; her face is of the hatchet cast, and
she has protruding teeth, long dark eyebrows,
stony eyes, and heavy eye-lashes. A sick
monkey is not a very enlivening sight;
a black man with chilblains and a fit of the
ague is not calculated to provoke cheerfulness,
and there are spectacles more cheerful
than a workhouse funeral on a wet day;
but all these are positively jocose and
Momus-like compared to Mademoiselle Batiste
wailing over her lady's wardrobe, her own
wrongs, and her unhappy destiny generally.
The climate, the food, the lodging, the
raiment, the tyranny of superiors, and the
insolence of inferiors: all these find a place in
the category of this melancholy lady's
unhappiness. She prophesies the decadence
of England with far more fervour than
M. Ledru Rollin. She will impress herself to
leave this detestable land; without sun, without
manners, without knowledge of living.
Somehow she does not quit the detestable
land. She is like (without disrespect) that
animal of delusive promise, the conjurer's
donkey, which is always going for to go,
but seldom does really go, up the ladder.
Mademoiselle Batiste weeps and moans, and
grumbles, and changes her situation
innumerable times, and packs up her " effects"
for the continent once a week or so; but stays
in England after all. When she has saved
enough money, she may perhaps revisit the
land of the Gaul, and relate to her compatriots
the affliction sore which long time she
bore among ces barbares.

In reality. Mademoiselle Batiste is an
excellent servant; she is not only apt but
erudite in all the cunning of her craft.
M. Anatole, of Regent Street, might take
lessons in hair-dressing from her. She far
surpasses Miss Tarlatan in dress-making;
although she disdains to include that
accomplishment in the curriculum of her duties.
But her principal skill lies in putting on
a dress, in imparting to her mistress when
dressed an air, a grace, a tournure, which any
but a French hand must ever despair of
accomplishing. Yet she grumbles meanwhile;
and when she has made a peri of a peeress,
sighs dolefully and maintains that an
Englishwoman does not know how to wear a robe.
This skill it is that makes her fretfulness and
melancholial distemper borne with by rank
and fashion. She has, besides, a pedigree of
former engagements of such magnitude and
grandeur, that rank and fashion are fain to
bow to her caprices. The beauteous Duchesse
de Faribole in Paris, and the Marquise de
Lysbrisée (very poor, very Legitimist, but
intensely fashionable); the famous Princess
Cabbagioso at Florence, Countess Moskamujikoff
at St. Petersburgh, the Duchess of
Champignon, the Marchioness of Truffleton
and Lady Frances Frongus in England—all
these high-born ladies has she delighted with
her skill, awed with her aristocratic antecedents,
and grieved with her melancholia.
Although so highly skilled in dress-making
she pays but little regard to costume herself.
Her figure is straight all the way down, on
all sides. She wears a long pendent shawl, a
dreary bonnet with trailing ribbons; and
carries, when abroad, a long, melancholy,
attenuated umbrella, like a parasol that had
outgrown itself, and was wasting away in
despair. These, with the long dull gold
drops to her ear-rings; two flat thin smooth
bands of hair flattened upon her forehead;
long listless fingers, and long feet encased
in French boots of lustreless kid, give
her an unspeakably mournful, trailing
appearance. She seems to have fallen
altogether into the " portion of weeds and
outgrown faces." Her voice is melancholy
and tristfully surgant, like an Æolian harp;
her delivery is reminiscent of the Dead
March in Saul;—a few wailing, lingering
notes, closed with a melancholy boom at the
end of the strophe. Adieu, Mademoiselle
Batiste.

There are plenty more lady's-maids who
want places; and, taking into consideration
the increased facilities offered by the abolition
of the duty on advertisements, I sincerely hope
they may all be suited satisfactorily. But I
cannot tarry to discuss all their several
qualifications. Although I can conscientiously