y the sovereign,--the interminable procession of
state carriages, with gleaming panels, great mirrors, gaudy,
gold-bespangled liveries, which passed amid the dazzled throngs,
reminding them of fairy tales, the equipages of Cinderella, and arousing
the same _Ohs_! of admiration that ascend and burst with the bombs at
displays of fireworks. And in the crowd there was always an obliging
police officer, of an erudite petty bourgeois with nothing to do, on the
watch for public ceremonials, to name aloud all the people in the
carriages as they passed with their proper escorts of dragoons,
cuirassiers or _gardes de Paris_.

First the representatives of the Emperor, the Empress, all the imperial
family; then, in hierarchical order, scientifically worked out, the
slightest departure from which might have caused a serious conflict
between the various bodies of the government, the members of the Privy
Council, the marshals, the admirals, the grand chancellor of the Legion
of Honor, the Senate, the Corps Legislatif, the Council of State, the
whole of the judicial and educational departments, whose costumes,
furred robes and wigs carried you back to the days of old Paris; they
seemed pompous, superannuated, out of place in the sceptical era of the
blouse and the black coat.

* * * * *

Felicia, to avoid thought, fixed her eyes persistently on that
monotonous procession, of exasperating length, and gradually a sort of
torpor stole over her, as if on a rainy day she were turning the leaves
of an album with colored plates lying on the table of a dreary salon, a
history of state costumes from the earliest times to our own day. All
those people, seen in profile, sitting erect and motionless behind the
wide glass panels, bore a close resemblance to the faces of people in
the colored fashion-plates displayed as near as possible to the
sidewalk, so that we may lose nothing of their gold embroidery, their
palm-leaves, their gold lace and braid; manikins intended to gratify the
curiosity of the vulgar and exposing themselves with an air of heedless
indifference.

Indifference! That was the most marked characteristic of that funeral.
You felt it everywhere, on the faces and in the hearts of the mourners,
not only among all those functionaries, most of whom had known the duke
by sight only, but in the ranks of those on foot between his hearse and
his coupe, his closest friends and those who were in daily atten