patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms.

With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled, frequenters of
this ancient salon, and some gentlemen; the Marquis de Sass****, private
secretary to Madame de Berry, the Vicomte de Val***, who published,
under the pseudonyme of Charles-Antoine, monorhymed odes, the Prince de
Beauff*******, who, though very young, had a gray head and a pretty and
witty wife, whose very low-necked toilettes of scarlet velvet with gold
torsades alarmed these shadows, the Marquis de C*****d'E******, the man
in all France who best understood "proportioned politeness," the Comte
d'Am*****, the kindly man with the amiable chin, and the Chevalier de
Port-de-Guy, a pillar of the library of the Louvre, called the King's
cabinet, M. de Port-de-Guy, bald, and rather aged than old, was wont
to relate that in 1793, at the age of sixteen, he had been put in the
galleys as refractory and chained with an octogenarian, the Bishop
of Mirepoix, also refractory, but as a priest, while he was so in the
capacity of a soldier. This was at Toulon. Their business was to go at
night and gather up on the scaffold the heads and bodies of the persons
who had been guillotined during the day; they bore away on their backs
these dripping corpses, and their red galley-slave blouses had a clot of
blood at the back of the neck, which was dry in the morning and wet at
night. These tragic tales abounded in Madame de T.'s salon, and by
dint of cursing Marat, they applauded Trestaillon. Some deputies of the
undiscoverable variety played their whist there; M. Thibord du Chalard,
M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the celebrated scoffer of the right, M.
Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff de Ferrette, with his short breeches
and his thin legs, sometimes traversed this salon on his way to M. de
Talleyrand. He had been M. le Comte d'Artois' companion in pleasures and
unlike Aristotle crouching under Campaspe, he had made the Guimard crawl
on all fours, and in that way he had exhibited to the ages a philosopher
avenged by a bailiff. As for the priests, there was the Abbe Halma, the
same to whom M. Larose, his collaborator on la Foudre, said: "Bah! Who
is there who is not fifty years old? a few greenhorns perhaps?" The Abbe
Letourneur, preacher to the King, the Abbe Frayssinous, who was not, as
yet, either count, or bishop, or minister, or peer, and who wore an old
cassock whose buttons were missing, and the Abbe Keravenant, Cure of
S