ey would go in, opera hat under arm, with that conquering air of
married men when they are unaccompanied by their wives.

What, then, could there be in this newspaper, this terrible article, to
menace to this degree the influence of so wealthy a man? Unfortunately,
my duties took up the whole of my time. I could go down neither to the
pantry nor to the cloak-room to obtain information, to chat with the
coachmen and valets and lackeys whom I could see standing at the foot
of the staircase, amusing themselves by jests upon the people who were
going up. What will you? Masters give themselves great airs also. How
not laugh to see go by with an insolent manner and an empty stomach the
Marquis and the Marquise de Bois l'Hery, after all that we have been
told about the traffickings of Monsieur and the toilettes of Madame? And
the Jenkins couple, so tender, so united, the doctor carefully putting
a lace shawl over his lady's shoulders for fear she should take cold
on the staircase; she herself smiling and in full dress, all in velvet,
with a great long train, leaning on her husband's arm with an air that
seems to say, "How happy I am!" when I happened to know that, in fact,
since the death of the Irishwoman, his real, legitimate wife, the doctor
is thinking of getting rid of the old woman who clings to him, in order
to be able to marry a chit of a girl, and that the old woman passes her
nights in lamentation, and in spoiling with tears whatever beauty she
has left.

The humorous thing is that not one of these people had the least
suspicion of the rich jests and jeers that were spat over their backs
as they passed, not a notion of the filth which those long trains drew
after them as they crossed the carpet of the antechamber, and they all
would look at you so disdainfully that it was enough to make you die of
laughing.

The two ladies whom I have just named, the wife of the governor, a
little Corsican, to whom her bushy eyebrows, her white teeth, and her
shining cheeks, dark beneath the skin, give the appearance of a woman of
Auvergne with a washed face, a good sort, for the rest, and laughing all
the time except when her husband is looking at other women; in addition,
a few Levantines with tiaras of gold or pearls, less perfect specimens
of the type than our own, but still in a similar style, wives of
upholsterers, jewellers, regular tradesmen of the establishment, with
shoulders as large as shop-fronts, and expensive toilett