"Have very fine pleats on the ruff and none at all on the sleeves.—Good-morning, Jenkins. At your service."
Jenkins bowed and stepped forward into the enormous room, whose windows, opening on a garden that extended to the Seine, commanded one of the loveliest views in all Paris, the bridges, the Tuileries, the Louvre, interlaced with trees as black as if they were drawn in India ink on the wavering background of the mist. A broad, very low bed on a platform a few steps above the floor, two or three small lacquer screens with vague fanciful decorations in gold, denoting, as did the double doors and the heavy woollen carpet, a dread of cold carried to excess, chairs of various styles, long chairs and low chairs, placed at random, all well-stuffed and of lazy or voluptuous shapes, composed the furniture of that famous room, where the most momentous and the most trivial questions were discussed with the same gravity of tone and manner. There was a beautiful portrait of the duchess on the wall; and on the mantel a bust of the duke, the work of Felicia Ruys, which had received the honor of a medal of the first class at the recent Salon.
"Well, Jenkins, how goes it this morning?" said His Excellency, walking to meet the doctor, while the costumer was collecting his fashion plates, which were strewn about over all the chairs.
"And you, my dear duke? I fancied that you were a little pale last night at the Variétés."
"Nonsense! I was never so well. Your pills have a most amazing effect on me. I feel so lively, so vigorous. When I think how completely foundered I was six months ago!"
Jenkins, without speaking, had put his great head against the minister's jacket, at the spot where the heart beats in the majority of mankind. He listened a moment while His Excellency continued to talk in the indolent, listless tone which was one of his chief claims to distinction.
"Whom were you with last night, doctor? That great bronzed Tartar who laughed so loud at the front of your box?"
"That was the Nabob, Monsieur le Duc. The famous Jansoulet, who is so much talked about just now."
"I might have suspected it. The whole audience was looking at him. The actresses played at him all the time. Do you know him? What sort of a man is he?"
"I know him. That is, I am treating him. Thanks, my dear duke, that's all. Everything is all right there. When he arrived in Paris a month ago, the change of climate disturbed him a little. He sent for me, and since then has taken a great fancy to me. All that I know of him is that he has a colossal fortune, made in Tunis, in the Bey's service, that he has a loyal heart, a generous mind in which ideas of humanity—"