Jocquelet began it, by speaking the name of one of the prettiest actresses in Paris.  He knew them all and described them exactly, detailing their beauties like a slave-dealer.

“So little Lucille Prunelle is a friend of the great Moncontour—­”

“Pardon me,” interrupted Gustave, who was looking badly, “she has already left him for Cerfbeer the banker.”

“I say she has not.”

“I say that she has.”

They would have quarrelled if Maurice, with his affable, bantering air, had not attacked Arthur Papillon on the subject of his love-affairs; for the young advocate drank many cups of Orleanist tea, going even into the same drawing-rooms as Beule and Prevost-Paradol, and accompanying political ladies to the receptions at the Academie Francaise.

“That is where you must make havoc, you rascal!”

But Papillon defends himself with conceited smiles and meaning looks.  According to him—­and he puts his two thumbs into the armholes of his vest—­the ambitious must be chaste.

“Abstineo venere,” said he, lowering his eyes in a comical manner, for he did not fear Latin quotations.  However, he declared himself very hard to please in that matter; he dreamed of an Egeria, a superior mind.  What he did not tell them was, that a dressmaker’s little errand-girl, with whom he had tried to converse as he left the law-school, had surveyed him from head to foot and threatened him with the police.

Upon some new joke of Maurice’s, the lawyer gave his amorous programme in the following terms: 

“Understand me, a woman must be as intelligent as Hypatia, and have the sensibility of Heloise; the smile of a Joconde, and the limbs of an Antiope; and, even then, if she had not the throat of a Venus de Medicis, I should not love her.”

Without going quite so far, the actor showed himself none the less exacting.  According to his ideas, Deborah, the tragedienne at the Odeon—­a Greek statue!—­had too large hands, and the fascinating Blanche Pompon at the Varietes was a mere wax doll.

Gustave, after all, was the one who is most intractable; excited by the Bordeaux wine—­a glass of mineral water would be best for him—­he proclaimed that the most beautiful creature was agreeable to him only for one day; that it was a matter of principle, and that he had never made but one exception, in favor of the illustrious dancer at the Casino Cadet, Nina l’Auvergnate, because she was so comical!  “Oh! my friends, she is so droll, she is enough to kill one!”

“To kill one!” Yes! my dear Monsieur Gustave, that is what will happen to you one of these fine mornings, if you do not decide to lead a more reasonable life—­and on the condition that you pass your winters in the South, also!

Poor Amedee was in torture; all his illusions—­desires and sentiments blended—­were cruelly wounded.  Then, he had just discovered a deplorable faculty; a new cause for being unhappy.  The sight of this foolishness made him suffer.  How these coarse young men lied!  Gustave seemed to him a genuine idiot, Arthur Papillon a pedant, and as to Jocquelet, he was as unbearable as a large fly buzzing between the glass and the curtain of a nervous man’s room.  Fortunately, Maurice made a little diversion by bursting into a laugh.