“Upon my word,” said he, “that is a solution which I do not at all accept.  I defy the gods ever to petrify my heart.”

A fiery gleam shot for a moment from his eyes, extinguished immediately by the thought that people were observing them.

In effect, people were observing them intently, but no one with so much curiosity as Jenkins, who wandered round them a little way off, impatient and fidgety, as though he were annoyed with Felicia for taking private possession of the important personage of the assembly.  The young girl laughingly called the duke’s attention to it.

“People will say that I am monopolizing you.”

She pointed out to him Monpavon waiting, standing near the Nabob who, from afar, was gazing at his excellency with the beseeching, submissive eyes of a big, good-tempered mastiff.  The Minister of State then remembered the object which had brought him.  He bowed to the young girl and returned to Monpavon, who was able at last to present to him “his honourable friend, M. Bernard Jansoulet.”  His excellency bowed slightly, the parvenu humbled himself lower than the earth, then they chatted for a moment.

A group curious to observe.  Jansoulet, tall, strong, with an air of the people about him, a sunburned skin, his broad back arched as though made round for ever by the low bowings of Oriental courtiery, his big, short hands splitting his light gloves, his excessive gestures, his southern exuberance chopping up his words like a puncher.  The other, a high-bred gentleman, a man of the world, elegance itself, easy in his least gestures, though these, however, were extremely rare, carelessly letting fall unfinished sentences, relieving by a half smile the gravity of his face, concealing beneath an imperturbable politeness the deep contempt which he had for man and woman; and it was in that contempt that his strength lay.  In an American drawing-room the antithesis would have been less violent.  The Nabob’s millions would have re-established the balance and even made the scale lean to his side.  But Paris does not yet place money above every other force, and to realize this, it was sufficient to observe the great contractor wriggling amiably before the great gentleman and casting under his feet, like the courtier’s cloak of ermine, the dense vanity of a newly rich man.

From the corner in which he had ensconced himself, de Gery was watching the scene with interest, knowing what importance his friend attached to this introduction, when the same chance which all through the evening had so cruelly been giving the lie to the native simplicity of his inexperience, caused him to distinguish a short dialogue near him, amid that buzz of many conversations through which each hears just the word that interests him.

“It is indeed the least that Monpavon can do, to enable him to make a few good acquaintances.  He has introduced him to so many bad ones.  You know that he has just put Paganetti and all his gang on his shoulders.”