Ordinarily he gave the cues to a Moldavian lady, who kept the conversation alive. This lady had travelled all over Europe, and related her travels in such a piercing and metallic voice, that you wondered if she had not a clarion somewhere in her body. She held forth unassisted, sometimes for a quarter of an hour together, principally about rice and the degree of civilization among the Turks, on the barbarism of the Russian generals, and on the baths of Constantinople. Her well-filled memory only overflowed in tirades: it was almost as amusing as a gazetteer.
Near her was a pale, slender, meagre Spaniard, with a face like a knife-blade. We knew, by some words he let fall, that he was rich and a republican. He spent his life with a newspaper in his hand,—he read twelve or fifteen of them in a day, with little dry, jerking movements, and nervous contractions that passed over his face like a shiver. He sat habitually in a corner, and you saw gleaming in his countenance feeble desires of proclamations and professions of faith. In the very same moment his glance died away like a too sudden fire that blazes up and falls again. He only spoke in monosyllables, and to ask for tea. His wife knew no French, and sat all the evening motionless in her arm-chair.
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Must we speak of an old lady from Saumur, a frequenter of the baths, watchful of the heat, the cold, the currents of air, the seasoning, determined not to enrich her heirs any sooner than it was necessary, who trotted about all day, and played with her dog in the evening? Of an abbé and his pupil, who dined apart, to escape the contagion of worldly conversation? etc. The truth is that there is nothing to paint, and that in the next restaurant you will see the same people.
Now, in good faith, what can be the conversation in such a society? As the answer is important, I beg the reader to run over the subjoined classification of interesting conversations; he will judge for himself as to the likelihood of meeting at a watering-place with anything similar.
First sort: Circumlocutions, oratorical argumentation, exordiums full of insinuation, smiles and bows, which may be translated by the following phrase: “Monsieur, help me to make a thousand francs.” Second sort: Periphrases, metaphysical disquisitions, the voice of the soul, gestures and genuflexions, ending in this phrase: “Madame, allow me to be your very humble servant.”
Third sort: Two persons who have need of each other are together; abstract of their conversation: “You are a great man.”