the Faubourg decide to run a candidate, he is pretty certain to be elected. Loti was run by those ladies, and the first thing he did was to scare the club by breaking with all its traditions and making a mockery of academic urbanity. Lavedan, as a reactionary candidate, was naturally the protected of clericals, aristocrats, and the flower of snobbery, and committed a still greater breach of academic etiquette than Loti, by a veiled and sneering attack upon the dead he was deputed to belaud.
I was present at this extraordinary séance, and, although the Marquis Costa de Beauregard is an academician whom posterity may in all safety be reckoned on to ignore, it was impossible to withhold cordial recognition of the justice and good taste of his sharp retort to the inexcusable offender. Meilhac, whose empty chair M. Lavedan was elected to fill, may or may not have been as black as his appointed eulogist painted him, but the Academy was not the place to attack this character, and the occasion chosen by M. Lavedan was as indelicate as if he had selected a man's open grave, with mourning relatives and friends around, for disrespectful usage of his name. Stupefied, as was everyone else by this singular proceeding, I questioned a friend whose privilege it is to wear the palm-embroidered coat and mother-of-pearl sword, and was told that this was M. Lavedan's way of avenging
