clients of the fashionable physician; the fine flower of society;
a strong political and financial element, bankers, deputies, a few
artists, all the jaded people of Parisian "high life," wan-faced, with
glittering eyes, saturated with arsenic like greedy mice, but with
appetite insatiable for poison and for life. The drawing-room being
thrown open, the vast antechamber of which the doors had been removed to
be seen, laden with flowers at the sides, the principal staircase of the
mansion, over which swept, now shaken out to their full extent, the
long trains, whose silky weight seemed to give a backward pull to the
undraped busts of the women in the course of that pretty ascending
movement which brought them into view, little by little, till the
complete flower of their splendour was reached. The couples as they
gained the top seemed to be making an entry on the stage of a theatre;
and that was twice true, since each person left on the last step the
contracted eyebrows, the lines that marked preoccupation, the wearied
air, his vexations, his sorrows, to display instead a contented face, a
gay smile over the reposeful harmony of the features. The men exchanged
honest shakes of the hand, exhibitions of fraternal good-feeling;
the women, preoccupied with themselves, as they stood making little
caracoling movements, with trembling graces, play of eyes and shoulders,
murmured, without meaning anything, a few words of greeting:

"Thank you--oh, thank you! How kind you are!"

Then the couples would separate, for evening parties are no longer the
gatherings of charming wits, in which feminine delicacy was wont to
compel the character, the lofty knowledge, the genius, even, of men
to bow graciously before it; but these overcrowded routs, in which the
women, who alone are seated, chattering together like slaves in a harem,
have no longer aught save the pleasure of being beautiful or appearing