“Oh that Leonide!” the Countess Sabine contented herself by murmuring, smiling her faint smile the while.

With a languid movement she eked out the thought that was in her.  After having lived there seventeen years she certainly would not alter her drawing room now.  It would henceforth remain just such as her mother-in-law had wished to preserve it during her lifetime.  Then returning to the subject of conversation: 

“I have been assured,” she said, “that we shall also have the king of Prussia and the emperor of Russia.”

“Yes, some very fine fetes are promised,” said Mme du Joncquoy.

The banker Steiner, not long since introduced into this circle by Leonide de Chezelles, who was acquainted with the whole of Parisian society, was sitting chatting on a sofa between two of the windows.  He was questioning a deputy, from whom he was endeavoring with much adroitness to elicit news about a movement on the stock exchange of which he had his suspicions, while the Count Muffat, standing in front of them, was silently listening to their talk, looking, as he did so, even grayer than was his wont.

Four or five young men formed another group near the door round the Count Xavier de Vandeuvres, who in a low tone was telling them an anecdote.  It was doubtless a very risky one, for they were choking with laughter.  Companionless in the center of the room, a stout man, a chief clerk at the Ministry of the Interior, sat heavily in an armchair, dozing with his eyes open.  But when one of the young men appeared to doubt the truth of the anecdote Vandeuvres raised his voice.

“You are too much of a skeptic, Foucarmont; you’ll spoil all your pleasures that way.”

And he returned to the ladies with a laugh.  Last scion of a great family, of feminine manners and witty tongue, he was at that time running through a fortune with a rage of life and appetite which nothing could appease.  His racing stable, which was one of the best known in Paris, cost him a fabulous amount of money; his betting losses at the Imperial Club amounted monthly to an alarming number of pounds, while taking one year with another, his mistresses would be always devouring now a farm, now some acres of arable land or forest, which amounted, in fact, to quite a respectable slice of his vast estates in Picardy.

“I advise you to call other people skeptics!  Why, you don’t believe a thing yourself,” said Leonide, making shift to find him a little space in which to sit down at her side.

“It’s you who spoil your own pleasures.”

“Exactly,” he replied.  “I wish to make others benefit by my experience.”

But the company imposed silence on him:  he was scandalizing M. Venot.  And, the ladies having changed their positions, a little old man of sixty, with bad teeth and a subtle smile, became visible in the depths of an easy chair.  There he sat as comfortably as in his own house, listening to everybody’s remarks and making none himself.  With a slight gesture he announced himself by no means scandalized.  Vandeuvres once more assumed his dignified bearing and added gravely: