It is admirably furnished, everything done with elegance and originality.

An incomparable conservatory, flooded with electric light; the buffet was placed in the conservatory under a vine laden with grapes, which one could gather by handfuls, and in the month of April! The accessories of the cotillon cost, it appears, more than 400,000 francs.

Ornaments, 'bon-bonnieres', delicious trifles, and we were begged to accept them.
For my part I took nothing, but there were many who made no scruple.
That evening Puymartin told me Mrs.Scott's history, but it was not at all like Monsieur de Larnac's story.

Roger said that, when quite little, Mrs.Scott had been stolen from her family by some acrobats, and that her father had found her in a travelling circus, riding on barebacked horses and jumping through paper hoops." "A circus-rider!" cried Madame de Lavardens, "I should have preferred the beggar." "And while Roger was telling me this Family Herald romance, I saw approaching from the end of a gallery a wonderful cloud of lace and satin; it surrounded this rider from a wandering circus, and I admired those shoulders, those dazzling shoulders, on which undulated a necklace of diamonds as big as the stopper of a decanter.

They say that the Minister of Finance had sold secretly to Mrs.Scott half the crown diamonds, and that was how, the month before, he had been able to show a surplus of 1,500,000 francs in the budget.