He, the
sleepiest, dullest, most British Britisher that had ever set a pretty
woman yawning, had secured a brilliant matrimonial prize for which, as
all chroniclers aver, there had been many competitors.
Marguerite St. Just had first made her DEBUT in artistic
Parisian circles, at the very moment when the greatest social upheaval
the world has ever known was taking place within its very walls.
Scarcely eighteen, lavishly gifted with beauty and talent, chaperoned
only by a young and devoted brother, she had soon gathered round her,
in her charming apartment in the Rue Richelieu, a coterie which was as
brilliant as it was exclusive--exclusive, that is to say, only from
one point of view. Marguerite St. Just was from principle and by
conviction a republican--equality of birth was her motto--inequality
of fortune was in her eyes a mere untoward accident, but the only
inequality she admitted was that of talent. "Money and titles may be
hereditary," she would say, "but brains are not," and thus her
charming salon was reserved for originality and intellect, for
brilliance and wit, for clever men and talented women, and the
entrance into it was soon looked upon in the world of intellect--which
even in those days and in those troublous times found its pivot in
Paris--as the seal to an artistic career.
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