of his _bons
mots_ as he detached the limbs of a partridge, and deposit it with a
wing in the plate that was handed him. He was a sculptor rather than an
_improvisateur_, and the new way of serving meats, having them carved
beforehand in the Russian fashion, had been fatal to him by depriving
him of all excuse for a preparatory silence. So it was generally said
that he was failing. He was a thorough Parisian, a dandy to his
fingers' ends, and as he himself boasted, "not full to bursting with
superstition," which fact enabled him to give some very piquant details
concerning the women in his theatrical company to Brahim Bey, who
listened to him as one turns the pages of an obscene book, and to talk
theology to his nearest neighbor, a young priest, cure of some little
Southern village, a thin, gaunt fellow, with a complexion as dark
as his cassock, with glowing cheek-bones, pointed nose, all the
characteristics of an ambitious man, who said to Cardailhac, in a very
loud voice, in a tone of condescension, of priestly authority:

"We are very well satisfied with Monsieur Guizot. He is doing well,
very well--it's a victory for the Church."

Beside that pontiff with the starched band, old Schwalbach, the famous
dealer in pictures, displayed his prophet's beard, yellow in spots like
a dirty fleece, his three mouldy-looking waistcoats and all the
slovenly, careless attire which people forgave him in the name of art,
and because he had the good taste to have in his employ, at a time when
the mania for galleries kept millions of money in circulation, the one
man who was most expert in negotiating those vainglorious transactions.
Schwalbach did not talk, contenting himself with staring about through
his enormous lens-shaped monocle, and smiling in his beard at the
extraordinary juxtapositions to be observed at that table, which stood
alone in all the world. For instance Monpavon had very near him--and
you should have seen how the disdainful curve of his nose was
accentuated at every glance in his direction--Garrigou the singer, a
countryman of Jansoulet, distinguished as a ventriloquist, who sang
_Figaro_ in the patois of the South and had not his like for imitating
animals. A little farther on, Cabassu, another fellow-countryman, a
short, thick-set man, with a bull-neck, a biceps worthy of Michel
Angelo, who resembled equally a Marseillais hair-dresser and the
Hercules at a country fair, a _masseur_, pedicurist, manicurist and