There were present the manager of the theatre financed by the Nabob, Cardailhac, renowned for his wit almost as much as for his insolvencies, a marvellous carver who, while he was engaged in severing the limbs of a partridge, would prepare one of his witticisms and deposit it with a wing upon the plate which was presented to him.  He worked up his witticisms instead of improvising them, and the new fashion of serving meats, a la Russe and carved beforehand, had been fatal to him by its removal of all excuse for a preparatory silence.  Consequently it was the general remark that his vogue was on the decline.  Parisian, moreover, a dandy to the finger tips, and, as he himself was wont to boast, “with not one particle of superstition in his whole body,” a characteristic which permitted him to give very piquant details concerning the ladies of his theatre to Brahim Bey—­who listened to him as one turns over the pages of a naughty book—­and to talk theology to the young priest who was his nearest neighbour, a curate of some little southern village, lean and with a complexion sunburnt till it matched the cloth of his cassock in colour, with fiery patches above the cheek-bones, and the pointed, forward-pushing nose of the ambitious man, who would remark to Cardailhac very loudly, in a tone of protection and sacerdotal authority: 

“We are quite pleased with M. Guizot.  He is doing very well—­very well.  It is a conquest for the Church.”

Seated next this pontiff, with a black neck-band, old Schwalbach, the famous picture-dealer, displayed his prophet’s beard, tawny in places like a dirty fleece, his three overcoats tinged by mildew, all that loose and negligent attire for which he was excused in the name of art, and because, in a time when the mania for picture galleries had already begun to cause millions to change hands, it was the proper thing to entertain the man who was the best placed for the conduct of these absurdly vain transactions.  Schwalbach did not speak, contenting himself with gazing around him through his enormous monocle, shaped like a hand magnifying-glass, and with smiling in his beard over the singular neighbours made by this unique assembly.  Thus it happened that M. de Monpavon had quite close to him—­and it was a sight to watch how the disdainful curve of his nose was accentuated at each glance in that direction—­the singer Garrigou, a fellow-countryman of Jansoulet, a distinguished ventriloquist who sang Figaro in the dialect of the south, and had no equal in his imitations of animals.  Just beyond, Cabassu, another compatriot, a little short and dumpy man, with the neck of a bull and the biceps of a statue by Michel Angelo, who suggested at once a Marseilles hairdresser and the strong man at a fair, a masseur, pedicure, manicure, and something of a dentist, sat with elbows on the table with the coolness of a charlatan whom one receives in the morning and knows the little infirmities, the intimate distresses