Emile Blondet, Journalist, with abundance of intellectual power, reckless, brilliant, and indolent, could do anything that he chose, yet he submitted to be exploited with his eyes open.  Treacherous or kind upon impulse, a man to love, but not to respect; quick-witted as a soubrette, unable to refuse his pen to any one that asked, or his heart to the first that would borrow it, Emile was the most fascinating of those light-of-loves of whom a fantastic modern wit declared that “he liked them better in satin slippers than in boots.”

The third in the party, Couture by name, lived by speculation, grafting one affair upon another to make the gains pay for the losses.  He was always between wind and water, keeping himself afloat by his bold, sudden strokes and the nervous energy of his play.  Hither and thither he would swim over the vast sea of interests in Paris, in quest of some little isle that should be so far a debatable land that he might abide upon it.  Clearly Couture was not in his proper place.

As for the fourth and most malicious personage, his name will be enough—­it was Bixiou!  Not (alas!) the Bixiou of 1825, but the Bixiou of 1836, a misanthropic buffoon, acknowledged supreme, by reason of his energetic and caustic wit; a very fiend let loose now that he saw how he had squandered his intellect in pure waste; a Bixiou vexed by the thought that he had not come by his share of the wreckage in the last Revolution; a Bixiou with a kick for every one, like Pierrot at the Funambules.  Bixiou had the whole history of his own times at his finger-ends, more particularly its scandalous chronicle, embellished by added waggeries of his own.  He sprang like a clown upon everybody’s back, only to do his utmost to leave the executioner’s brand upon every pair of shoulders.

The first cravings of gluttony satisfied, our neighbors reached the stage at which we also had arrived, to wit, the dessert; and, as we made no sign, they believed that they were alone.  Thanks to the champagne, the talk grew confidential as they dallied with the dessert amid the cigar smoke.  Yet through it all you felt the influence of the icy esprit that leaves the most spontaneous feeling frost-bound and stiff, that checks the most generous inspirations, and gives a sharp ring to the laughter.  Their table-talk was full of bitter irony which turns a jest into a sneer; it told of the exhaustion of souls given over to themselves; of lives with no end in view but the satisfaction of self—­of egoism induced by these times of peace in which we live.  I can think of nothing like it save a pamphlet against mankind at large which Diderot was afraid to publish, a book that bares man’s breast simply to expose the plague-sores upon it.  We listened to just such a pamphlet as Rameau’s Nephew, spoken aloud in all good faith, in the course of after-dinner talk in which nothing, not even the point which the speaker wished to carry, was sacred from epigram; nothing taken for granted, nothing built up except on ruins, nothing reverenced save the sceptic’s adopted article of belief—­the omnipotence, omniscience, and universal applicability of money.