something of a dentist, rested both elbows on the table with the
assurance of a quack whom one receives in the morning and who knows the
petty weaknesses, the private miseries of the house in which he happens
to be. M. Bompain completed that procession of subalterns, all
classified with reference to some one specialty. Bompain, the
secretary, the steward, the man of confidence, through whose hands all
the business of the establishment passed; and a single glance at that
stupidly solemn face, that vague expression, that Turkish fez poised
awkwardly on that village schoolmaster's head, sufficed to convince one
what manner of man he was to whom interests like the Nabob's had been
entrusted.

Lastly, to fill the gaps between the figures we have sketched, Turks of
every variety! Tunisians, Moors, Egyptians, Levantines; and, mingled
with that exotic element, a whole multicolored Parisian Bohemia of
decayed gentlemen, squinting tradesmen, penniless journalists,
inventors of strange objects, men from the South landed in Paris
without a sou--all the tempest-tossed vessels to be revictualled, all
the flocks of birds whirling about in the darkness, that were attracted
by that great fortune as by the light of a lighthouse. The Nabob
received that motley crew at his table through kindness of heart,
generosity, weakness, and entire lack of dignity, combined with
absolute ignorance, and partly as a result of the same exile's
melancholy, the same need of expansion that led him to receive, in his
magnificent palace on the Bardo in Tunis, everybody who landed from
France, from the petty tradesman and exporter of small wares, to the
famous pianist on a tour and the consul-general.

Listening to those different voices, those foreign accents, incisive or
stammering, glancing at those varying types of countenance, some
uncivilized, passionate, unrefined, others over-civilized, faded, of
the type that haunts the boulevards, over-ripe as it were, and
observing the same varieties in the corps of servants, where
"flunkeys," taken the day before from some office, insolent fellows,
with the heads of dentists or bath-attendants, bustled about among the
motionless Ethiopians, who shone like black marble torch-holders,--it
was impossible to say exactly where you were; at all events, you would
never have believed that you were on Place Vendome, at the very heart
and centre of the life of our modern Paris. On the table there was a
similar outlandish