by the Nabob, who, from
afar, bestowed upon His Excellency the submissive, imploring gaze of a
great faithful dog. Thereupon the Minister of State remembered what had
brought him there. He bowed to Felicia and returned to Monpavon, who
was able at last to present "his honorable friend, Monsieur Bernard
Jansoulet." His Excellency bowed; the parvenu humbled himself lower
than the earth; then they conversed for a moment.

It was an interesting group to watch. Jansoulet, tall and strongly
built, with his vulgar manners, his tanned skin, his broad back, bent
as if it had become rounded for good and all in the salaams of Oriental
sycophancy, his short fat hands bursting through his yellow gloves, his
abundant pantomime, his Southern exuberance causing him to cut off his
words as if with a machine. The other, of noble birth, a thorough man
of the world, elegance itself, graceful in the least of his gestures,
which were very rare by the way, negligently letting fall incomplete
sentences, lighting up his grave face with a half smile, concealing
beneath the most perfect courtesy his boundless contempt for men and
women; and that contempt was the main element of his strength. In an
American parlor the antithesis would have been less offensive. The
Nabob's millions would have established equilibrium and even turned the
scale in his favor. But Paris does not as yet place money above all the
other powers, and, to be convinced of that fact, one had only to see
that stout merchant frisking about with an amiable smile before the
great nobleman, and spreading beneath his feet, like the courtier's
ermine cloak, his dense parvenu's pride.

From the corner in which he had taken refuge, de Gery was watching the
scene with interest, knowing what importance his friend attached to
this presentation, when chance, which had so cruelly given the lie all
the evening to his artless neophyte's ideas, brought to his ears this
brief dialogue, in that sea of private conversations in which every one
hears just the words that are of interest to him:

"The least that Monpavon can do is to introduce him to some decent
people. He has introduced him to so many bad ones. You know that he's
just tossed Paganetti and his whole crew into his arms."

"The poor devil! Why, they'll devour him."

"Pshaw! it's only fair to make him disgorge a little. He stole so much
down there among the Turks."

"Really, do you think so?"

"Do I think so! I have some very pr