MADAME DE JULIETTA

Two novellas, one short, and one a little longer, will be published simultaneously (but not in one volume where they might have had an easier sale) and provide delicate diversions of a bygone world where there is the leisure to indulge the vanities and vagaries of love and pursue its subtle calculation and caprice. Madame de which opened last month as The Earrings of Madame de traces the wayward destiny of a pair of diamond earrings, the wedding gift of Monsieur de to his bride, and then his mistress, and finally of the Ambassador- who loves her- to Madame de... Julietta, a fickle, fabricating eighteen, becomes the fiancee of the Prince d'Alpen, a man of many victims and much wealth, but she runs away from the marriage which is most dazzling at a distance. Concealed in the house of Andre Landrecourt, who at the moment is entertaining his mistress there, an elaborate game of hide and seek ensues; Julietta unsettles the lovers- disconcerts herself with the knowledge that she has fallen in love, and finally is free- to follow her heart... These contes, which owe a little to a de Maupassant, even more to the graces with which Mme. de Vilmorin endows them, have a worldly innocence, a rustling elegance, and a fragile charm.