“Is it really true she is only sixteen?”
“Sixteen years of the cask and some few extra years of the bottle.”
“Mayol!—O, come now! Mayol!—finished, empty! and to think that the opera gives two thousand francs every night to that thing!”
“Yes, but he has to spend a thousand francs of seats to get his auditorium warm, and then, on the sly, Cadaillac gets all the rest of it away from him playing écarté.”
“Bordeaux!—chocolate!—champagne!—”
“—will have to come and explain himself before the commission.”
“—by raising the ruche a little with bows of white satin.”
In another part of the house Mlle. Le Quesnoy, closely surrounded by friends, recommends her tabor player to a foreign correspondent with an impudent head as flat as that of a choumacre and begs him not to leave before the end of the play; she scolds Méjean, who is not supporting her properly, and calls him a false Southerner, a franciot and a renegade. In the group near by a political discussion has started. One mouth opens in a hateful way with foam about the teeth and says, chewing on the words as if they were musket balls and he would like to poison them:
“Whatever exists in the most destructive of demagogies—”
“—Marat the conservative!” said a voice—but the rest of the sentence was lost in a confused noise of conversations mixed with clattering of plates and glasses, which the coppery tones of Roumestan’s voice all of a sudden dominated: “Ladies! hurry, ladies!—or you will miss the sonata in fa!”