YOUNG LADY CIGARETTE PARTIES.

Thames Star, Volume XI, Issue 3455, 21 January 1880, Page 2

YOUNG LADY CIGARETTE PARTIES.

What one thinks in America of cigarettesmoking women one soon ceases to think in Europe, where it is so frequent. For does not fat, famous, frolicsome Emily Faitbfull smoke like a. Michigan tug b'oat'P Does not the Duchess of Edinburgh.enjoy a quiet puff now and then, ,Wd even the Princess of Wales has her pretty little cigarette-case, which the hides profoundly from the smoke abhorring nose of her Royal mamma inlaw ? Mdme* Katazzi, in Italy, is said to be a great smoker, and so also is Elizabeth Thompson, the artist, in England. Tlie two daughters of tbe Duo d'Orleans, one of whom was. the beautiful Mercedes, Queen of Spain, were fond of a quiet smoke, as is also the wife of, the Pretender Don Carlos. Although smoking ladies are so numerous in Europe, one often hears it insisted upon that American ladies are the greatest habitual smokers in the. world. "I never saw a lady smoke in America," I had occasion to frequently say in France, and always, with the uusatisfactory feeling that I was not half believed. Once upon a time in Paris I lived several months in an extonsive pension dcs demoiselles. In this flourishing school was Mdlle. N., a young American of 22, from Bostdn, a sort of parlor boarder, who had many extra privileges besides that of a private bedroom, when every other pupil slept in a tiny couch in a dormitory that looked exactly like an hospital. " Ah, but your American ladies do smoke, and smoke a great deal more than our French men," said the matron of the school one day. " Mdlle. N. smokes much more than M. le Professeur, and if you "don't believe it I will some day show you the ashes that come down from her room." I said nothing. And yet I could have to!d that which would have made madame's golden wig stand up like quills on a fretful porcupine and reduce the matron to a state of gibbering idiocy. I could have told that, indeed, many cigarettes were smoked in Mdile. N.s room each night, and that great were tbe ashes thereof; also could I have told that every night when that huge dormitory full of pupils was still and every girl asleep, four of the teachers, all girls themselves of from 20 to 22, whose business it was to watch and guard that sleeping fold, stole softly from their beds up the attic stairs, across the roof, down a skylight, and thus into Mdlle. N.'g room, where, with a bottle or two of beer and unlimited cigarettes, they smoked, drank, and chattered till—good* ness only knows how late—as if this were, indeed, not a. pension d6s demoiselles, but a popular Irasserie in the Latin Quarter.— Letter in Chicago Inter-Ocean.