t, the rascal--more than all his bourgeois fellow-guests
together. Among the very rare persons who inspired a sympathetic feeling
in his breast, little Chebe, whom he had known as an urchin, appealed
particularly to him; and she, for her part, having become rich too
recently not to venerate wealth, talked to her right-hand neighbor with a
very perceptible air of respect and coquetry.

With her left-hand-neighbor, on the contrary, Georges Fromont, her
husband's partner, she exhibited the utmost reserve. Their conversation
was restricted to the ordinary courtesies of the table; indeed there was
a sort of affectation of indifference between them.

Suddenly there was that little commotion among the guests which indicates
that they are about to rise: the rustling of silk, the moving of chairs,
the last words of conversations, the completion of a laugh, and in that
half-silence Madame Chebe, who had become communicative, observed in a
very loud tone to a provincial cousin, who was gazing in an ecstasy of
admiration at the newly made bride's reserved and tranquil demeanor, as
she stood with her arm in Monsieur Gardinois's:

"You see that child, cousin--well, no one has ever been able to find out
what her thoughts were."

Thereupon the whole party rose and repaired to the grand salon.

While the guests invited for the ball were arriving and mingling with the
dinner-guests, while the orchestra was tuning up, while the cavaliers,
eyeglass in position, strutted before the impatient, white-gowned
damsels, the bridegroom, awed by so great a throng, had taken refuge with
his friend Planus--Sigismond Planus, cashier of the house of Fromont for
thirty years--in that little gallery decorated with flowers and hung with
a paper representing shrubbery and clambering vines, which forms a sort
of background of artificial verdure to Vefour's gilded salons.

"Sigismond, old friend--I am very happy."

And Sigismond too was happy; but Risler did not give him time to say so.
Now that he was no longer in dread of weeping before his guests, all the
joy in his heart overflowed.

"Just think of it, my friend!--It's so extraordinary that a young girl
like Sidonie would consent to marry me. For you know I'm not handsome. I
didn't need to have that impudent creature tell me so this morning to
know it. And then I'm forty-two--and she such a dear little thing! There
were so many others she might have chosen, among the youngest and the
richest, to