business, at the house of Monseigneur. Military officers
destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship;
civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of
the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser
lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly
in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order
of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from
which anything was to be got--these were to be told off by the score and
the score. People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the
State, yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with
lives passed in traveling by any straight road to any true earthly end,
were no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty
remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their
courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had
discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the
State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to
root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears
they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving
Philosophers who were remodeling the world with words, and making
card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with unbelieving
Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this
wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of
the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time--and has ever
since--to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural
subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of
exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various
notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the Spies
among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur--forming a goodly half of
the polite company--would have found it hard to discover among the
angels of that sphere one solitary wife who in her manners and
appearance owned to being a mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of
bringing a troublesome creature into this world--which does not go far
towards the realization of the name of mother--there was no such thing
known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close,
and brought them up; and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and
supped as at twenty.

The leprosy of unreality