ENTERTAINING VARIETIES. 549 



Koffca Ben Lukas made his salaam to the Commander of the Faithful, than he 

 was presented with a purse of four hundred and fifty golden denari, and ottered 

 fifty more if lie would leave the capital before night. He had been summoned 

 through a misunderstanding, they told him, and the Caliph did not wish it 

 to become public that by his mistake an illustrious scholar had thus been fool- 

 ishly interrupted in his studies. 



Marshal Venddme. If cynicism had not ceased to rank as a branch of 



philosophy, France could boast of having produced the greatest philosopher of 

 the last twenty centuries. Louis- Joseph, Duke of Vendoine, great-grandson 

 of Henry IV, was a man of principles. lie used to take a bath on the first day 

 of every month, and during the remaining four weeks avoided water in every 

 form his toilet-articles being limited to a jackknife and a piece of beeswax. 

 On the day of the monthly purification his rooms were also cleansed, his study 

 with a broom and his bedroom with a shovel, for a pack of hunting-dogs shared 

 his couch and often reared their progeny under his bed. The destruction of all 

 earthly laundries would not have shaken the peace of his manly soul ; his under- 

 wear consisted of a buckskin shirt and short socks of the same material, his bed 

 of a bunk and three blankets, one of them rolled up in the shape of a pillow. 

 At the table of the Comte d'Ambleve he often gorged himself till he could 

 hardly rise from his chair; but at home he used to avoid that difficulty by tak- 

 ing his meals in bed, and there were weeks when he did not leave his bed at all. 

 Brushes, combs, looking-glasses, rnarriage-rings, prayer-books, handkerchiefs, 

 soap and wash-basins, were luxuries the noble warrior managed to dispense with ; 

 ceremonies were his grand aversion, and the demerits of the frail sex the subject 

 of his daily anathemas. But this man, whom the priests accused of all the vices 

 mentioned in Peter Lombard's revised catalogue, was a Mars on the battle-field, 

 the idol of the army, and, in the opinion of Prince Eugene, the one soldier who 

 could have saved France if the petticoat-government had not thwarted him. 



Curious Predictions. Mother Shipton, too, has foundered on a cliff that 



is strewed with the wreck of numerous vaticinations. On this side of the Indus, 

 it seems, Messiahs are not sufficiently encouraged to venture upon a second 

 advent. " This whole business of the Delphic fraternity," says Professor Hegel, 

 "is nothing but Scheiben-schiessen im Nebel target-practice in a fog." Still, it 

 must be admitted that some of the marksmen have scored remarkable hits. Not 

 all prophets have " prophesied after the event," for it can not be denied that, 

 eight years before the birth of Napoleon Bonaparte, the author of the "Contrat 

 Social " (Jean Jacques Rousseau) recorded in print the following augurium : 

 " J'ai un presentiment que la Corse produira un homme qui etonnera le monde " 

 ("I have a presentiment that Corsica is going to produce a man who Avill astonish 

 the world)." Napoleon himself believed in omens and portents as firmly as any 

 Roman Caasar, and openly professed his confidence in certain lucky clays (the 2d 

 of December and 24th of October, for instance). He confessed to Las Casas 

 that in the night before the battle of Leipsic he was on the point of revoking all 

 his orders and abandoning his position, having been seized with a sudden mis- 

 giving, which only the stronger fear of ridicule helped him to overcome ; and 

 after his Russian campaign he certainly had some excuse for being a little super- 

 stitious. In the winter of 1807 the arbiter of Europe took it into his head one 

 day to consult the famous clairvoyante Lenormand, whose feats in "astrology" 

 were setting all Paris agog. The Pythoness told him that his fears of another 

 outbreak in Austria were unfounded. "Your power has not culminated yet," 



