"I like monologues less than chansonnettes!—I, who address you, have taken lessons from Levassor."
"Levassor, Your Excellency?" answered in chorus a lot of little bald-headed young men—diplomats.
"Levassor," replied the old gentleman who was the very celebrated ambassador of a great foreign power. "Oh! I was famous in the song: The Englishman Who Was Seasick!"
While the little young men smiled, approved and loudly applauded, the old ambassador to whom the interests of a people were entrusted, hummed in a low tone, amid the noise of the reception:
"Aoh! aoh! Je suis mélède,
Bien mélède! Très mélède!"
Guy de Lissac shrugged his shoulders. He had heard a great deal of this man. This diplomat of the chansonnette evoked his pity. Where was he then? At Paris or at Brives-la-Gaillarde? At a ball at the Hôtel Beauvau or in some provincial sub-prefecture?
Just before, he had heard Warcolier utter this epic expression:
"If I were minister, I would give fireworks. They are warlike and inoffensive at the same time!"
The voice of a young man with a Russian accent who talked politics in a corner, pleased him:
"I am," he said aloud, "from a singular country: the Baltic provinces, where society is governed by deputies who, by birth, have the right to make laws, and I consider politics so tiresome, fatiguing and full of disgust and weariness as an occupation, that one ought to consider one's self most fortunate that there are people condemned to take hold of this rancid pie, while others pass their lives in thinking, reading, talking and loving."