ips, heads, breasts, legs, and arms,
all mingling and growing indistinct in the distance. On the left
stretched a line of busts--such delightful ones--furnishing a most
comical and uncommon suite of noses. There was the huge pointed nose
of a priest, the tip-tilted nose of a soubrette, the handsome classical
nose of a fifteenth-century Italian woman, the mere fancy nose of a
sailor--in fact, every kind of nose, both the magistrate's and the
manufacturer's, and the nose of the gentleman decorated with the Legion
of Honour--all of them motionless and ranged in endless succession!

However, Claude saw nothing of them; to him they were but grey spots
in the hazy, greenish light. His stupor still lasted, and he was only
conscious of one thing, the luxuriousness of the women's dresses, of
which he had formed a wrong estimate amid the pushing in the galleries,
and which were here freely displayed, as if the wearers had been
promenading over the gravel in the conservatory of some chateau. All the
elegance of Paris passed by, the women who had come to show themselves,
in dresses thoughtfully combined and destined to be described in the
morrow's newspapers. People stared a great deal at an actress, who
walked about with a queen-like tread, on the arm of a gentleman who
assumed the complacent airs of a prince consort. The women of society
looked like so many hussies, and they all of them took stock of one
another with that slow glance which estimates the value of silk and the
length of lace, and which ferrets everywhere, from the tips of boots
to the feathers upon bonnets. This was neutral ground, so to say;
some ladies who were seated had drawn their chairs together, after
the fashion in the garden of the Tuileries, and occupied themselves
exclusively with criticising those of their own sex who passed by. Two
female friends quickened their pace, laughing. Another woman, all alone,
walked up and down, mute, with a black look in her eyes. Some others,
who had lost one another, met again, and began ejaculating about
the adventure. And, meantime, the dark moving mass of men came to a
standstill, then set off again till it stopped short before a bit of
marble, or eddied back to a bit of bronze. And among the mere bourgeois,
who were few in number, though all of them looked out of their element
there, moved men with celebrated names--all the _illustrations_ of
Paris. A name of resounding glory re-echoed as a fat, ill-clad gentleman
pas