before him as upon the glassy waters of a lake. It seemed to him that
this sudden illumination, a sort of fantastic apotheosis as it were, was
like the fairy-like aureole that attended his progress.

At the very moment of leaving the greenroom, Sulpice had jostled
accidentally against a man of very grave aspect wearing a black coat
closely buttoned. He was almost bald save for some long, thin, gray
locks that hung about his huge ears, his cheeks had a hectic color and
his skull was yellow. He entered this salon in a hesitating, inquisitive
way, with wide-open eyes and a gourmand's movement of the nostrils, and
gazed about the room, warm with lights and heavy with perfume.

Sulpice glanced at him carelessly and recognized him as the man whom he
himself had superseded on Place Beauvau--a Puritan, a Huguenot, a
widower, the father of five or six daughters, and as solemn and proper
in his ordinary demeanor as a Sunday-school tract. Sulpice could not
refrain from crying out merrily: "Bless me! Monsieur Pichereau!"

The other shook his butter-colored skull as if he had suddenly received
a stinging blow on it with a switch, and his red face became
crimson-hued at the sight of Sulpice, his successor in office, standing
before him, politely holding out to him his two gloved hands.

Guy de Lissac was no longer laughing.

Their two Excellencies found themselves face to face at the foot of the
greenroom staircase, in the midst of a crowd of brahmins, dancers,
negresses, and female supernumeraries; two Excellencies meeting there;
one smiling, the other grimacing beneath the glance of this curious,
shrewd little world.