nor amusing.  In others, you are pestered to death by the amphitryon, who is perhaps endowed with the bump of music, and won’t leave the piano for fear some one else should take his place.  There are others fond of cards, who only ask their friends that they may make up a table.  Such individuals care for nothing but the game, and don’t trouble themselves whether the rest of their guests are amused or not.  Ah! there are few homes that know how to receive their company, or make every body pleased.  It requires a tact, a cleverness, an absence of self, which must surely be very unusual since we see so few specimens of them in the soirees we attend.

M. Lupot went to and fro—­from the reception-room to the bed-chamber, and back again—­he smiled, he bowed, and rubbed his hands.  But the new-comers, who had not come to his house to see him smile and rub his hands, began to say, in very audible whispers, “Ah, well, do people pass the whole night here looking at each other?  Very delightful—­very!”

M. Lupot has tried to start a conversation with a big man in spectacles, with a neckcloth of great dimensions, and who makes extraordinary faces as he looks round on the company.  M. Lupot has been told, that the gentleman with the large neckcloth is a literary man, and that he will probably be good enough to read or recite some lines of his own composition.  The ancient stationer coughs three times before venturing to address so distinguished a character, but says at last—­“Enchanted to see at my house a gentleman so—­an author of such——­”

“Ah, you’re the host here, are you?—­the master of the house?”—­said the man in the neckcloth.

“I flatter myself I am—­with my wife, of course—­the lady on the sofa—­you see her?  My daughter, sir—­she’s the tall young lady, so upright in her figure.  She designs, and has an excellent touch on the piano.  I have a son also—­a little fiend—­it was he who crept this minute between my legs—­he’s an extraordinary clev——­”

“There is one thing, sir,” replied the big man, “that I can’t comprehend—­a thing that amazes me—­and that is, that people who live in the Rue Grenetat should give parties.  It is a miserable street—­a horrid street—­covered eternally with mud—­choked up with cars—­a wretched part of the town, dirty, noisy, pestilential—­bah!”

“And yet, sir, for thirty years I have lived here.”

“Oh Lord, sir, I should have died thirty times over!  When people live in the Rue Grenetat they should give up society, for you’ll grant it is a regular trap to seduce people into such an abominable street.  I”——­

M. Lupot gave up smiling and rubbing his hands.  He moves off from the big man in the spectacles, whose conversation had by no means amused him, and he goes up to a group of young people who seem examining the Belisarius of Mademoiselle Celanire.

“They’re admiring my daughter’s drawing,” said M. Lupot to himself; “I must try to overhear what these artists are saying.”  The young people certainly made sundry remarks on the performance, plentifully intermixed with sneers of a very unmistakable kind.