quite
surprised not to find the rosette of red ribbon sticking to my flannel
waistcoats."

Vaudrey left Marie Launay, greatly to her surprise, and listened to
Molina's chronicles of the ballet.

Ah! if his Excellency had but the time, he would have seen the funniest
things. For instance, there was amongst the dancers a marble cutter, who
during the day sold and cut his gravestones and came here at night to
grin and caper in the ballet. He was on the scent of every funeral from
the Opera; he would get orders for tombstones between two dances at the
rehearsals. One day Molina had been present at one of these. It seems
incredible, but there was a bank clerk in a gray coat, a three-cornered
hat upon his head and a brass buckler on his arm, who sacrificed to
Venus in the interval between his two occupations, dancing with the
coryphees; a dancer by night and a receiver of money by day. A girl was
rehearsing beside him, in black bands and skirt. Then Molina,
astonished, inquired who she might be. He was told that it was a girl in
mourning, whose mother had just died. The Opera is a fine stage upon
which to behold the ironies and contrasts of life.

The financier might have related to Sulpice Vaudrey a description of a
journey to Timbuctoo and have found him less amused and less interested
than now. It was a world new and strange to him, attractive, and as
exciting as acid to this man, still young, whose success had been
achieved by unstinted labors, and who knew Paris only by what he had
learned of it years ago, when a law student: the pit of the Comedie
Francaise, the Luxembourg galleries and those of the Louvre, the Public
Libraries, the Hall of Archives, the balls in the Latin Quarter, the
holidays and the foyer of the Opera once or twice on the occasion of a
masked ball. And, besides that?--Nothing. That was all.

The great man from Grenoble arrived in Paris with his appetite whetted
for the life of the city, and now he was here, suddenly plunged into the
greenroom of the ballet, and all eyes were turned towards him, almost
frightened as he was, on catching a glimpse of his own image reflected
in the huge mirror glittering under the numerous lights, in the heart of
this strange salon and surrounded by half-clad dancing girls. Then, too,
everybody was looking at him, quizzing him, shrinking from him through
timidity or running after him through interest. The new Minister of
State! The chief of all the personnel of pref