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Marie Gaunt had come to Rome to paint the portrait of a fashionable woman; had been "taken up" by other mondaines; and Angelo, meeting her at a dinner, had fallen in love with and followed her to Dresden, where she lived and had made her reputation as an artist.
The Fenayrou Case There is an account of this case in Bataille "Causes Criminelles et Mondaines" , and in Mace's book, "Femmes Criminelles." It is alluded to in "Souvenirs d'un President d'Assises," by Berard des Glajeux. The murder of the chemist Aubert by Marin Fenayrou and his wife Gabrielle was perpetrated near Paris in the year 1882. In its beginning the story is commonplace enough.
Princes and counts, lawyers and doctors, actors and actresses, mondaines of the great world, demi-mondaines of the half world, waiters and porters, all are made use of as occasion arises. It may well happen that your interesting acquaintance in the salon of an express steamer or your charming companion in the tearoom of the Ritz is the paid agent of some government.
He would merely say, in general terms and in these general terms he knew he was correct that my costume had of late assumed 'des facons mondaines, which it wounded him to see."
What "facons mondaines" he discovered in my present winter merino and plain white collar, I own it puzzled me to guess: and when I asked him, he said it was all made with too much attention to effect and besides, "had I not a bow of ribbon at my neck?"
By aid of this starveling stock pauvre plante et vergette of the French language, he must speak delicately, movingly, if he is ever to speak so at all: that, or none, must be for him the medium of what he calls, in one of his great phrases, le discours fatal des choses mondaines that discourse about affairs which decides men's fates.
The crude blue of her dress, the tags and ends of tinselled braid set his teeth on edge. In his "Count Poleski" days he had known the quiet and exquisite taste of the mondaines of Vienna and St. Petersburg, and like most men he preferred dark clothes in the street. Later on he proposed to himself the pleasure of supervising her wardrobe, except her boots, which met with his fullest approbation.
She was so different from the beautiful but heartless mondaines he had known in Town. No diamonds glittered round her slender throat, and her hands, though small and well-shaped, were tanned by the summer sun.
Lanyard himself remembered many such women, brilliant mondaines from many lands domiciled in that Paris of the so-dead yesterday to serve by stealth their respective governments; but never, it was true, a woman of the caste of Cecelia Brooke; unless, indeed, this were an actress of surpassing talent, gifted to hoodwink the most skeptical and least susceptible of men. And yet....
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