Now, on the morning of the very day when Madame de Saint-Esteve had prophesied success to Victorin, Carabine had said to du Tillet at about seven o’clock: 

“If you want to be very nice, you will give me a dinner at the Rocher de Cancale and bring Combabus.  We want to know, once for all, whether he has a mistress.—­I bet that he has, and I should like to win.”

“He is still at the Hotel des Princes; I will call,” replied du Tillet.  “We will have some fun.  Ask all the youngsters—­the youngster Bixiou, the youngster Lora, in short, all the clan.”

At half-past seven that evening, in the handsomest room of the restaurant where all Europe has dined, a splendid silver service was spread, made on purpose for entertainments where vanity pays the bill in bank-notes.  A flood of light fell in ripples on the chased rims; waiters, whom a provincial might have taken for diplomatists but for their age, stood solemnly, as knowing themselves to be overpaid.

Five guests had arrived, and were waiting for nine more.  These were first and foremost Bixiou, still flourishing in 1843, the salt of every intellectual dish, always supplied with fresh wit—­a phenomenon as rare in Paris as virtue is; Leon de Lora, the greatest living painter of landscape and the sea who has this great advantage over all his rivals, that he has never fallen below his first successes.  The courtesans could never dispense with these two kings of ready wit.  No supper, no dinner, was possible without them.

Seraphine Sinet, dite Carabine, as the mistress en titre of the Amphitryon, was one of the first to arrive; and the brilliant lighting showed off her shoulders, unrivaled in Paris, her throat, as round as if turned in a lathe, without a crease, her saucy face, and dress of satin brocade in two shades of blue, trimmed with Honiton lace enough to have fed a whole village for a month.

Pretty Jenny Cadine, not acting that evening, came in a dress of incredible splendor; her portrait is too well known to need any description.  A party is always a Longchamps of evening dress for these ladies, each anxious to win the prize for her millionaire by thus announcing to her rivals: 

“This is the price I am worth!”

A third woman, evidently at the initial stage of her career, gazed, almost shamefaced, at the luxury of her two established and wealthy companions.  Simply dressed in white cashmere trimmed with blue, her head had been dressed with real flowers by a coiffeur of the old-fashioned school, whose awkward hands had unconsciously given the charm of ineptitude to her fair hair.  Still unaccustomed to any finery, she showed the timidity—­to use a hackneyed phrase —­inseparable from a first appearance.  She had come from Valognes to find in Paris some use for her distracting youthfulness, her innocence that might have stirred the senses of a dying man, and her beauty, worthy to hold its own with any that Normandy has ever supplied to the theatres of the capital.  The lines of that unblemished face were the ideal of angelic purity.  Her milk-white skin reflected the light like a mirror.  The delicate pink in her cheeks might have been laid on with a brush.  She was called Cydalise, and, as will be seen, she was an important pawn in the game played by Ma’ame Nourrisson to defeat Madame Marneffe.