“Let me have it, if you please, mademoiselle.”

Granet began to laugh.

“Ah! ah!” he cried, “you are really going to write down under Monsieur Gigonnet’s signature the name of the Minister of the Interior?”

“Oh! bless me!” said Vaudrey, laughing, “that is true!  You will believe it or not as you please, but I quite forgot that I was a minister.”

“It was the same with me when I was decorated,” said Molina.  “I would not receive my great-coat from box-openers because I saw the morsel of red ribbon hanging on it, and I was sure the garment was not mine.  But one grows used to it after a while!  Now,” and his laugh with the hundred-sou piece ring grew louder than ever, “I am really quite surprised not to find the rosette of red ribbon sticking to my flannel waistcoats.”

Vaudrey left Marie Launay, greatly to her surprise, and listened to Molina’s chronicles of the ballet.

Ah! if his Excellency had but the time, he would have seen the funniest things.  For instance, there was amongst the dancers a marble cutter, who during the day sold and cut his gravestones and came here at night to grin and caper in the ballet.  He was on the scent of every funeral from the Opera; he would get orders for tombstones between two dances at the rehearsals.  One day Molina had been present at one of these.  It seems incredible, but there was a bank clerk in a gray coat, a three-cornered hat upon his head and a brass buckler on his arm, who sacrificed to Venus in the interval between his two occupations, dancing with the coryphees; a dancer by night and a receiver of money by day.  A girl was rehearsing beside him, in black bands and skirt.  Then Molina, astonished, inquired who she might be.  He was told that it was a girl in mourning, whose mother had just died.  The Opera is a fine stage upon which to behold the ironies and contrasts of life.

The financier might have related to Sulpice Vaudrey a description of a journey to Timbuctoo and have found him less amused and less interested than now.  It was a world new and strange to him, attractive, and as exciting as acid to this man, still young, whose success had been achieved by unstinted labors, and who knew Paris only by what he had learned of it years ago, when a law student:  the pit of the Comedie Francaise, the Luxembourg galleries and those of the Louvre, the Public Libraries, the Hall of Archives, the balls in the Latin Quarter, the holidays and the foyer of the Opera once or twice on the occasion of a masked ball.  And, besides that?—­Nothing.  That was all.

The great man from Grenoble arrived in Paris with his appetite whetted for the life of the city, and now he was here, suddenly plunged into the greenroom of the ballet, and all eyes were turned towards him, almost frightened as he was, on catching a glimpse of his own image reflected in the huge mirror glittering under the numerous lights, in the heart of this strange salon and surrounded by half-clad dancing girls.  Then, too, everybody was looking at him, quizzing him, shrinking from him through timidity or running after him through interest.  The new Minister of State!  The chief of all the personnel of prefects, under-prefects, and secretaries-general represented there, lolling on these velvet divans in this vulgar greenroom.