to any true earthly end, were
no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies
for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly
patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had
discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the
State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to
root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears
they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving
Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making
card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving
Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this
wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of
the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time--and has been
since--to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural
subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of
exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various
notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the spies
among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur--forming a goodly half
of the polite company--would have found it hard to discover among
the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and
appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of
bringing a troublesome creature into this world--which does not go far
towards the realisation of the name of mother--there was no such thing
known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close,
and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and
supped as at twenty.

The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance
upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional
people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that
things in general were going rather wrong. As a promising way of setting
them right, half of the half-dozen had become members of a fantastic
sect of Convulsionists, and were even then considering within themselves
whether they should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on the
spot--thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the
Future, for Monseigneur's guidance. Besides these Dervishes, were other
three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with a
jargon about "the Centre of Truth:" holding that Man had got