y easy
virtue. That rumor was whispered about wherever he went, and gave him
an envied and most contemptible prominence in his circle.

Jansoulet insisted upon reading the article, being impatient to hear
what was said of him. Unfortunately Jenkins had left his copy at the
duke's.

"Let some one go at once and get me a _Messager_," said the Nabob
to the servant behind his chair.

Moessard interposed:

"That isn't necessary; I must have the thing about me."

And with the free and easy manner of the tap-room habitue, of the
reporter who scrawls his notes as he sits in front of his mug of beer,
the journalist produced a pocketbook stuffed with memoranda, stamped
papers, newspaper clippings, notes on glossy paper with crests--which
he scattered over the table, pushing his plate away, to look for the
proof of his article.

"Here it is." He passed it to Jansoulet; but Jenkins cried out:

"No, no, read it aloud."

As the whole party echoed the demand, Moessard took back his proof and
began to read aloud the WORK OF BETHLEHEM AND M. BERNARD JANSOULET, a
long deliverance in favor of artificial nursing, written from Jenkins'
notes, which were recognizable by certain grandiloquent phrases of the
sort that the Irishman affected: "the long martyrology of infancy--the
venality of the breast--the goat, the beneficent nurse,"--and
concluding, after a turgid description of the magnificent establishment
at Nanterre, with a eulogy of Jenkins and the glorification of
Jansoulet: "O Bernard Jansoulet, benefactor of infancy!"

You should have seen the annoyed, scandalized faces of the guests. What
a schemer that Moessard was! What impudent sycophancy! And the same
envious, disdainful smile distorted every mouth. The devil of it was
that they were forced to applaud, to appear enchanted, as their host's
sense of smell was not surfeited by the odor of incense, and as he took
everything very seriously, both the article and the applause that it
called forth. His broad face beamed during the reading. Many and many a
time, far away in Africa, he had dreamed of being thus belauded in the
Parisian papers, of becoming a person of some consequence in that
society, the first of all societies, upon which the whole world has its
eyes fixed as upon a beacon-light. Now that dream was fulfilled. He
gazed at all those men around his table, at that sumptuous dessert, at
that wainscoted dining-room, certainly as high as the church in his
native villa