“A sausage with paws, I!  A sausage with paws, I!” repeated the coachman, choking with rage, while his innocent victim was being carried into the adjoining room, where the ladies and girls found occupation in bathing his nose.  The disturbance was quickly appeased, thanks to our arrival, thanks also to the wise words of M. Barreau, a middle-aged man, sedate and majestic, with a manner resembling my own.  He is the Nabob’s cook, a former chef of the Cafe Anglais, whom Cardailhac, the manager of the Nouveautes, has procured for his friend.  To see him in a dress-coat, with white tie, his handsome face full and clean-shaven, you would have taken him for one of the great functionaries of the Empire.  It is true that a cook in an establishment where the table is set every morning for thirty persons, in addition to madame’s special meal, and all eating only the very finest and most delicate of food, is not the same as the ordinary preparer of a ragout.  He is paid the salary of a colonel, lodged, boarded, and then the perquisites!  One has hardly a notion of the extent of the perquisites in a berth like this.  Every one consequently addressed him respectfully, with the deference due to a man of his importance.  “M.  Barreau” here, “My dear M. Barreau” there.  For it is a great mistake to imagine that servants among themselves are all cronies and comrades.  Nowhere do you find a hierarchy more prevalent than among them.  Thus at M. Noel’s party I distinctly noticed that the coachmen did not fraternize with their grooms, nor the valets with the footmen and the lackeys, any more than the steward or the butler would mix with the lower servants; and when M. Barreau emitted any little pleasantry it was amusing to see how exceedingly those under his orders seemed to enjoy it.  I am not opposed to this kind of thing.  Quite on the contrary.  As our oldest member used to say, “A society without a hierarchy is like a house without a staircase.”  The observation, however, seems to me one worth setting down in these memoirs.

The party, I need scarcely say, did not shine with its full splendour until after the return of its most beauteous ornaments, the ladies and girls who had gone to nurse the little Tom, ladies’-maids with shining and pomaded hair, chiefs of domestic departments in bonnets adorned with ribbons, negresses, housekeepers, a brilliant assembly in which I was immediately given great prestige, thanks to my dignified bearing and to the surname of “Uncle” which the younger among these delightful persons saw fit to bestow upon me.

I fancy there was in the room a good deal of second-hand frippery in the way of silk and lace, rather faded velvet, even, eight-button gloves that had been cleaned several times, and perfumes abstracted from madame’s dressing-table, but the faces were happy, thoughts given wholly to gaiety, and I was able to make a little corner for myself, which was very lively, always within the bounds of propriety—­that goes without