up the scandals of a great Court, and it made some great men ridiculous and worse, so eighty thousand copies of it had been sold over Europe, and great ladies leaned from their carriages eager to see Mdlle. Jenny Léa pass by them.
Mdlle. Jenny Léa, indeed, having put the finishing stroke to her popularity by immense debts and a forced sale of her effects in Paris, was the sensation of the hour, only sharing public attention with the Père Hilarion, a young and passionately earnest Dominican, who was making a crusade against the world, in a noble and entirely vain fervour, from the pulpits of all the greatest churches on the Continent. It was "the thing" to go and hear Père Hilarion, weep with him and pray with him, and then coming out of the church doors to read Jenny Léa and talk of her. It is by these admirable mixtures that Society manages to keep itself alive.
The Père Hilarion was breaking his great heart over the vileness and the hopelessness of it all, as anyone who has any soul in him must be disposed to do. But to Society the Père Hilarion was only a sort of mental liqueur, as Jenny Léa
