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44 and Mademoiselle, turning round with a most gracious smile to her young assistant, for the first time remarked how very handsome he was.

Ah! the slight things in life are the irrevocable. The actions on which we calculate and decide never bring the important consequences which we expected from them. It is the thoughtless, the careless, the unmarked of the minute, that set their seal upon our fate—that are the final and the fatal in their results. That youth was Lauzun. I do believe, that the rule of love at first sight, like all other rules, admits of exceptions—while so many characters and temperaments exist, no one law can extend to all; but this I also believe, that love at first sight belongs to the highest and most imaginative order of passion—it stamps it at once with the seeming of destiny. All my readers may not assent to the truth of this assertion; but there must be some who will acknowledge, that at the first introduction of an individual, they felt that one was fated to influence all their afterlife—and when did such presentiment prove erroneous?

"You really," said the Chevalier de Joinville, "must come into the next room—Madame de l'Hôpital is astonishing us all by her skill in