“Eh! pardieu! why, here is Ramel!”

He immediately extended both hands in warm greeting to this man of sixty years, wearing a white cravat twisted round his neck, like a neckerchief in the old-fashioned style, and whose black waistcoat with its standing collar of ancient pattern was conspicuous amid the open waistcoats of the fashionably-dressed young men who had been very eagerly surrounding the minister for the last few moments.

“Good day, Ramel!—­How delighted I am to see you!”—­

“And I also,” said Ramel in a friendly and affectionate tone, while his face, that seemed severe, but was only good-natured and masculine, suddenly beamed.  “It is not a little on your account that I came here.”

“Really?”

“Really.  I was anxious to shake hands with you.  It is so long since I saw you.  How much has happened since then!”

“Ah!  Ramel, who the devil would have said that I should be minister when I took you my first article for the Nation Francaise!” said Vaudrey.  “Bah! who is not a minister?” said Ramel.  “You are.  Remember what Napoleon said to Bourrienne as he entered the Tuileries:  ’Here we are, Bourrienne! now we must stay here!’”

“That is exactly what Granet said to me when he told me of the new combination.”

“Granet expressed in that more of an after-thought than your old Ramel.”

“My best friend,” said Sulpice with emotion, grasping this man’s hands in his.

“It is so much more meritorious on your part to tell me that,” said Ramel, “seeing that now you do not lack friendships.”

“You are still a pessimist, Ramel?”

“I—­A wild optimist, seeing that I believe everything and everybody!  But I must necessarily believe in the stupidity of my fellows, and upon this point I am hardly mistaken.”

“But what brings you to Madame Marsy’s, you who are a perfect savage?”

“Tamed!—­Because, I repeat to you, I knew that you were coming and that Monsieur de Rosas was to speak on the subject of savages, and these please me.  If I had been rich or if I only had enough to live on, I should have passed my life in travelling.  And in the end, I shall have lived between Montmartre and Batignolles:  a tortoise dreaming that he is a swallow—­”

“Ramel, my dear fellow,” said the minister, “would you wish me to give you a mission where you could go and study whatever seemed good to you?”

“With my rheumatism?  Thanks, your Excellency!” said Ramel, smiling.  “No, I am too old, and never having asked any one for anything, I am not going to begin at my age.”

“You do not ask, it is offered you.”

“Well, I have no desire for that.  I am at the hour of the far niente that precedes the final slumber.  It is a pleasant condition.  One has seen so many things and persons that one has no further desires.”

“The fact is,” said the minister, “that if all the people you have obligated in your life had solicited an invitation from Madame Marsy, these salons would not be large enough to contain them.”