Once again she was profoundly depressed.  She remembered the dinner with horror.  The long, crowded table, with semi-circular ends, in the oppressive and reeking dining-room lighted by oil-lamps!  There must have been at least forty people at that table.  Most of them ate disgustingly, as noisily as pigs, with the ends of the large coarse napkins tucked in at their necks.  All the service was done by the fat woman whom she had seen at the window with Gerald, and a young girl whose demeanour was candidly brazen.  Both these creatures were slatterns.  Everything was dirty.  But the food was good.  Chirac and Gerald were agreed that the food was good, as well as the wine.  “Remarquable!” Chirac had said, of the wine.  Sophia, however, could neither eat nor drink with relish.  She was afraid.  The company shocked her by its gestures alone.  It was very heterogeneous in appearance, some of the diners being well dressed, approaching elegance, and others shabby.  But all the faces, to the youngest, were brutalized, corrupt, and shameless.  The juxtaposition of old men and young women was odious to her, especially when those pairs kissed, as they did frequently towards the end of the meal.  Happily she was placed between Chirac and Gerald.  That situation seemed to shelter her even from the conversation.  She would have comprehended nothing of the conversation, had it not been for the presence of a middle-aged Englishman who sat at the opposite end of the table with a youngish, stylish Frenchwoman whom she had seen at Sylvain’s on the previous night.  The Englishman was evidently under a promise to teach English to the Frenchwoman.  He kept translating for her into English, slowly and distinctly, and she would repeat the phrases after him, with strange contortions of the mouth.

Thus Sophia gathered that the talk was exclusively about assassinations, executions, criminals, and executioners.  Some of the people there made a practice of attending every execution.  They were fountains of interesting gossip, and the lions of the meal.  There was a woman who could recall the dying words of all the victims of justice for twenty years past.  The table roared with hysteric laughter at one of this woman’s anecdotes.  Sophia learned that she had related how a criminal had said to the priest who was good-naturedly trying to screen the sight of the guillotine from him with his body:  “Stand away now, parson.  Haven’t I paid to see it?” Such was the Englishman’s rendering.  The wages of the executioners and their assistants were discussed, and differences of opinions led to ferocious arguments.  A young and dandiacal fellow told, as a fact which he was ready to vouch for with a pistol, how Cora Pearl, the renowned English courtesan, had through her influence over a prefect of police succeeded in visiting a criminal alone in his cell during the night preceding his execution, and had only quitted him an hour before the final summons.  The tale won the honours of the dinner.  It was