xed,
and upon his eyes without lashes, inflamed and red. It was a head such
as one may see in the dock at certain criminal trials that are held with
closed doors. The other guests were seated pell-mell, just as they had
happened to arrive or to find themselves, for the house was open to
everybody, and the table was laid every morning for thirty persons.

There were present the manager of the theatre financed by the Nabob,
Cardailhac, renowned for his wit almost as much as for his insolvencies,
a marvellous carver who, while he was engaged in severing the limbs of
a partridge, would prepare one of his witticisms and deposit it with
a wing upon the plate which was presented to him. He worked up his
witticisms instead of improvising them, and the new fashion of serving
meats, _a la Russe_ and carved beforehand, had been fatal to him by its
removal of all excuse for a preparatory silence. Consequently it was the
general remark that his vogue was on the decline. Parisian, moreover,
a dandy to the finger tips, and, as he himself was wont to boast, "with
not one particle of superstition in his whole body," a characteristic
which permitted him to give very piquant details concerning the ladies
of his theatre to Brahim Bey--who listened to him as one turns over the
pages of a naughty book--and to talk theology to the young priest who
was his nearest neighbour, a curate of some little southern village,
lean and with a complexion sunburnt till it matched the cloth of his
cassock in colour, with fiery patches above the cheek-bones, and the
pointed, forward-pushing nose of the ambitious man, who would remark
to Cardailhac very loudly, in a tone of protection and sacerdotal
authority:

"We are quite pleased with M. Guizot. He is doing very well--very well.
It is a conquest for the Church."

Seated next this pontiff, with a black neck-band, old Schwalbach, the
famous picture-dealer, displayed his prophet's beard, tawny in places
like a dirty fleece, his three overcoats tinged by mildew, all that
loose and negligent attire for which he was excused in the name of art,
and because, in a time when the mania for picture galleries had already
begun to cause millions to change hands, it was the proper thing to
entertain the man who was the best placed for the conduct of these
absurdly vain transactions. Schwalbach did not speak, contenting himself
with gazing around him through his enormous monocle, shaped like a
hand magnifying-glass, an