sels the famous anecdote, preserved in Rollin's _Ancient
History_, concerning Combabus, that voluntary Abelard who was placed in
charge of the wife of a King of Assyria, Persia, Bactria, Mesopotamia,
and other geographical divisions peculiar to old Professor du Bocage,
who continued the work of d'Anville, the creator of the East of
antiquity. This nickname, which gave Carabine's guests laughter for a
quarter of an hour, gave rise to a series of over-free jests, to which
the Academy could not award the Montyon prize; but among which the name
was taken up, to rest thenceforth on the curly mane of the handsome
Baron, called by Josepha the splendid Brazilian--as one might say a
splendid _Catoxantha_.

Carabine, the loveliest of her tribe, whose delicate beauty and amusing
wit had snatched the sceptre of the Thirteenth Arrondissement from
the hands of Mademoiselle Turquet, better known by the name of
Malaga--Mademoiselle Seraphine Sinet (this was her real name) was to du
Tillet the banker what Josepha Mirah was to the Duc d'Herouville.

Now, on the morning of the very day when Madame de Saint-Esteve had
prophesied success to Victorin, Carabine had said to du Tillet at about
seven o'clock:

"If you want to be very nice, you will give me a dinner at the _Rocher
de Cancale_ and bring Combabus. We want to know, once for all, whether
he has a mistress.--I bet that he has, and I should like to win."

"He is still at the Hotel des Princes; I will call," replied du Tillet.
"We will have some fun. Ask all the youngsters--the youngster Bixiou,
the youngster Lora, in short, all the clan."

At half-past seven that evening, in the handsomest room of the
restaurant where all Europe has dined, a splendid silver service was
spread, made on purpose for entertainments where vanity pays the bill
in bank-notes. A flood of light fell in ripples on the chased rims;
waiters, whom a provincial might have taken for diplomatists but for
their age, stood solemnly, as knowing themselves to be overpaid.

Five guests had arrived, and were waiting for nine more. These were
first and foremost Bixiou, still flourishing in 1843, the salt of every
intellectual dish, always supplied with fresh wit--a phenomenon as rare
in Paris as virtue is; Leon de Lora, the greatest living painter of
landscape and the sea who has this great advantage over all his rivals,
that he has never fallen below his first successes. The courtesans could
never dispense with these