ding or walking about with a
pretence of serious conversation, but obviously engaged in attracting
His Highness's attention. It was for His Highness that Landry the
musician stood pensive by the chimney-piece, gazing upward with his
inspired brow and his apostolic beard; for him that on the other side
Delpech the chemist stood meditative with his chin upon his hand, poring
intently with gathered brows as if watching the precipitation of a
compound.

Laniboire the philosopher, famous for his likeness to Pascal, was
wandering round, perpetually passing before the sofa, where, unable
to escape from Jean Rehu, sat the Prince. The hostess had forgotten to
present him, and his fine nose looked longer than usual and seemed to
be making a desperate appeal: 'Cannot you see that this is the nose of
Pascal?'

At the same sofa Madame Eviza was shooting between her scarcely parted
eyelids a look which asked His Highness to name his own price if he
would but be seen at her reception next Monday. Ah! change the scene
as you will, it is always the same performance--pretension, meanness,
readiness to bow down, the courtier's appetite for self-humiliation
and self-abasement. We need not decline the visits of majesty; we are
provided with all the properties required for the occasion.

'General.'

'Your Highness.'

'I shall never be in time for the ballet.'

'But why are we staying, Sir?'

'I don't know; there's to be a surprise when the Nuncio is gone.'

While these few words passed in an undertone between the pair, they
neither looked at each other nor changed a muscle of their ceremonial
countenances. The Aide-de-camp had copied from his master the nasal
intonation, the absence of gesture, the fixed attitude on the edge of
the seat with the bowed arm against the side. He was rigid as on parade
or in the Imperial box at the Theatre Michel. Old Rehu stood before
them, he would not sit down; he was still talking, still exhibiting the
dusty stores of his memory, the people he had known, the many fashions
in which he had dressed. The more distant the time, the clearer his
recollection. 'That is a thing I have seen,' says he, as he pauses at
the end of a story, with his eyes fixed, as it were, upon the flying
past, and then off upon a fresh subject. He had been with Talma at
Brunoy, he had been in the drawing-room of Josephine, full of musical
boxes and artificial humming-birds covered with jewels, which sang and
clapped their wing