Clarisse Besnus, whom a lady had brought up from Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer in the capacity of maid while the lady’s husband had started her in quite another line.  There was Simonne Cabiroche, the daughter of a furniture dealer in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, who had been educated in a large boarding school with a view to becoming a governess.  Finally there were Maria Blond and Louise Violaine and Lea de Horn, who had all shot up to woman’s estate on the pavements of Paris, not to mention Tatan Nene, who had herded cows in Champagne till she was twenty.

Georges listened and looked at these ladies, feeling dizzy and excited by the coarse recital thus crudely whispered in his ear, while behind his chair the waiters kept repeating in respectful tones: 

“Pullets a la marechale; fillets of sole with ravigote sauce.”

“My dear fellow,” said Daguenet, giving him the benefit of his experience, “don’t take any fish; it’ll do you no good at this time of night.  And be content with Leoville:  it’s less treacherous.”

A heavy warmth floated upward from the candelabras, from the dishes which were being handed round, from the whole table where thirty-eight human beings were suffocating.  And the waiters forgot themselves and ran when crossing the carpet, so that it was spotted with grease.  Nevertheless, the supper grew scarce any merrier.  The ladies trifled with their meat, left half of it uneaten.  Tatan Nene alone partook gluttonously of every dish.  At that advanced hour of the night hunger was of the nervous order only, a mere whimsical craving born of an exasperated stomach.

At Nana’s side the old gentleman refused every dish offered him; he had only taken a spoonful of soup, and he now sat in front of his empty plate, gazing silently about.  There was some subdued yawning, and occasionally eyelids closed and faces became haggard and white.  It was unutterably slow, as it always was, according to Vandeuvres’s dictum.  This sort of supper should be served anyhow if it was to be funny, he opined.  Otherwise when elegantly and conventionally done you might as well feed in good society, where you were not more bored than here.  Had it not been for Bordenave, who was still bawling away, everybody would have fallen asleep.  That rum old buffer Bordenave, with his leg duly stretched on its chair, was letting his neighbors, Lucy and Rose, wait on him as though he were a sultan.  They were entirely taken up with him, and they helped him and pampered him and watched over his glass and his plate, and yet that did not prevent his complaining.

“Who’s going to cut up my meat for me?  I can’t; the table’s a league away.”

Every few seconds Simonne rose and took up a position behind his back in order to cut his meat and his bread.  All the women took a great interest in the things he ate.  The waiters were recalled, and he was stuffed to suffocation.  Simonne having wiped his mouth for him while Rose and Lucy were changing his plate, her act struck him as very pretty and, deigning at length to show contentment: