The apartments are flooded with a mellow light from paraffine candles in solid silver candelabra.
The company is the most aristocratic and wealthy in Paris.
Three or four brass bands are playing behind a portière between the coal shed, and also behind time. Footmen in gay-laced livery bring in beer noiselessly and carry out apple-peelings dropped by the guests.
Valerie, seventh Duchess du Bellairs, leans back on a solid gold ottoman on eiderdown cushions, surrounded by the wittiest, the bravest, and the handsomest courtiers in the capital.
“Ah, madame,” said the Prince Champvilliers, of Palais Royale, corner of Seventy-third Street, “as Montesquiaux says, ‘Rien de plus bon tutti frutti’—Youth seems your inheritance. You are to-night the most beautiful, the wittiest in your own salon. I can scarce believe my own senses, when I remember that thirty-one years ago you—”
“Saw it off!” says the Duchess peremptorily.
The Prince bows low, and drawing a jewelled dagger, stabs himself to the heart.
“The displeasure of your grace is worse than death,” he says, as he takes his overcoat and hat from a corner of the mantelpiece and leaves the room.
“Voilà,” says Bèebè Francillon, fanning herself languidly. “That is the way with men. Flatter them, and they kiss your hand. Loose but a moment the silken leash that holds them captive through their vanity and self-opinionativeness, and the son-of-a-gun gets on his ear at once. The devil go with him, I say.”
“Ah, mon Princesse,” sighs the Count Pumpernickel, stooping and whispering with eloquent eyes into her ear. “You are too hard upon us. Balzac says, ‘All women are not to themselves what no one else is to another.’ Do you not agree with him?”