Miss Bianca Columbina had lately found herself the recipient of polite attentions from a swart gentleman with a Caledonian burr. Being in possession of a trusting and, it must be confessed, superficial nature, she was not at all put out of countenance by the solicitations of this gentleman, such being the niceness and delicacy of the addresses which he made to her, and appeared to be thoroughly susceptible to the vividness of the contrast between his ineffable swartness and her own unknowable whiteness. So affecting did she find the demeanour of the swart gentleman with the Caledonian burr, that she very quickly - in a matter of days, indeed - erased from her tabula the memory of that other rather more importunate gentleman, the one with the grey plumage and the red tail-feathers whom, giving in to her natural proclivities, she had once nursed in St Peter Port, but who despite all the solemn promises which he had bestowed upon her, had lately left off paying her his attentions. —
St Peter Port, Bianca Columbina
“Dearest Bianca,” quoth he, “I bring you news. There have been some developments, which present the world to me in quite a different life. I have discovered that the wife whom I solemnly wedded under Lex Matrimonia Avum most basely betrayed me with another creature, a base and damned mynah. In short, she contracted in a bigamous covenant with that fellow. Not only that,” and now the importunate gentleman ground his beak, “but she also had the effrontery to foist a foundling upon me.” —
Lex Matrimonia Avum
“Moreover, dearest Bianca,” quoth he, essaying to compose himself, “my false wife, to whom for all her falsity I was solemnly wedded under Lex Matrimonia Avum, was lately afflicted with a tumour. When we took her to the hotel des invalides, the good people in that place saw fit to ease her passage from this world by the administration of certain … palliatives.” —
Hotel des Invalides
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