es; finally,
sundry ladies, wives of officials of the Territorial, in sorry, badly
creased dresses; these constituted the sole representation of the fair
sex in the assembly, some thirty ladies lost among a thousand black
coats--that is to say, practically none at all. From time to time
Cassagne, Laporte, Grandvarlet, who were serving the refreshments in
trays, stopped to inform us of what was passing in the drawing-rooms.

"Ah, my boys, if you could see it! it has a gloom, a melancholy. The men
don't stir from the buffets. The ladies are all at the back, seated in a
circle, fanning themselves and saying nothing. The fat old lady does
not speak to a soul. I fancy she is sulking. You should see the look on
Monsieur! Come, _pere_ Passajon, a glass of Chateau-Larose; it will pick
you up a bit."

They were charmingly kind to me, all these young people, and took a
mischievous pleasure in doing me the honours of the cellar so often and
so copiously, that my tongue commenced to become heavy, uncertain, and
as the young folk said to me, in their somewhat free language. "Uncle,
you are babbling." Happily the last of the effendis had just arrived,
and there was nobody else to announce; for it was in vain that I sought
to shake off the impression, every time I advanced between the curtains
to send a name hurtling through the air at random, I saw the chandeliers
of the drawing-rooms revolving with hundreds of dazzling lights, and the
floors slipping away with sharp and perpendicular slopes like Russian
mountains. I was bound to get my speech mixed, it is certain.

The cool night-air, sundry ablutions at the pump in the court-yard,
quickly got the better of this small discomfort, and when I entered the
cloak-room nothing of it was any longer apparent. I found a numerous and
gay company collected round a _marquise au champagne_, of which all
my nieces, wearing their best dresses, with their hair puffed out
and cravats of pink ribbon, took their full share notwithstanding
exclamations and bewitching little grimaces that deceived nobody.
Naturally, the conversation turned on the famous article, an article by
Moessard, it appears, full of frightful occupations which the Nabob was
alleged to have followed fifteen or twenty years ago, at the time of his
first sojourn in Paris.

It was the third attack of the kind which the _Messenger_ had published
in the course of the last week, and that rogue of a Moessard had the
spite to send the