As the white mass of silk pushed along the white-painted corridor, the sense of ceremony that had till then oppressed it, evaporated in the fumes of the blazing gas, and something like a battle began in the blue drawing-room.  Heat and fatigue soon put an end to all coquetting between the sexes.  The beautiful silks were hidden by the crowd; only the shoulders remained, and, to appease their terrible ennui, the men gazed down the backs of the women’s dresses.  Shoulders were there, of all tints and shapes.  Indeed, it was like a vast rosary, alive with white, pink, and cream-coloured flowers; of Marechal Niels, Souvenir de Malmaisons, Mademoiselle Eugene Verdiers, Aimee Vibert Scandens.  Sweetly turned, adolescent shoulders, blush-white, smooth and even as the petals of a Marquise Mortemarle; the strong, commonly turned shoulders, abundant and free as the fresh rosy pink of the Anna Alinuff; the drooping white shoulders, full of falling contours as a pale Madame Lacharme; the chlorotic shoulders, deadly white, of the almost greenish shade that is found in a Princess Clementine; the pert, the dainty little shoulders, filled with warm pink shadows, pretty and compact as Countess Cecile de Chabrillant; the large heavy shoulders full of vulgar madder tints, coarse, strawberry-colour, enormous as a Paul Neron; clustering white shoulders, grouped like the blossoms of an Aimee Vibert Scandens, and, just in front of me, under my eyes, the flowery, the voluptuous, the statuesque shoulders of a tall blonde woman of thirty, whose flesh is full of the exquisite peach-like tones of a Mademoiselle Eugene Verdier, blooming in all its pride of summer loveliness.

To make way for this enormous crowd, the Louis XV. sofas and arm-chairs had been pushed against the walls, and an hour passed wearily, in all its natural impudence, in this beautiful drawing-room, the brain aching with dusty odour of poudre de riz, and the many acidities of evaporating perfume; the sugary sweetness of the blondes, the salt flavours of the brunettes, and this allegro movement of odours was interrupted suddenly by the garlicky andante, deep as the pedal notes of an organ, that the perspiring armpits of a fat chaperon exhaled slowly.

At last there was a move forwards, and a sigh of relief, a grunt of satisfaction, broke from the oppressed creatures; but a line of guardsmen was pressing from behind, and the women were thrown hither and thither into the arms and on to the backs of soldiers, police officers, county inspectors, and Castle underlings.  Now a lady turns pale, and whispers to her husband that she is going to faint; now a young girl’s petticoats have become entangled in the moving mass of legs!  She cries aloud for help; her brother expostulates with those around.  He is scarcely heeded.  And the struggle grows still more violent when it becomes evident that the guardsmen are about to bring down the bar; and, begging a florid-faced attorney to unloose his sword, which had become entangled