Sandoz and Claude had to eat, seated obliquely and half strangled between two parties of people whose elbows almost ended by getting into their plates; and each time that a waiter passed he gave their chairs a shake with his hips.  However, the inconvenience, like the abominable cookery, made one gay.  People jested about the dishes, different tables fraternised together, common misfortune brought about a kind of pleasure party.  Strangers ended by sympathising; friends kept up conversations, although they were seated three rows distant from one another, and were obliged to turn their heads and gesticulate over their neighbours’ shoulders.  The women particularly became animated, at first rather anxious as to the crush, and then ungloving their hands, catching up their skirts, and laughing at the first thimbleful of neat wine they drank.

However, Sandoz, who had renounced finishing his meat, raised his voice amid the terrible hubbub caused by the chatter and the serving: 

‘A bit of cheese, eh?  And let’s try to get some coffee.’

Claude, whose eyes looked dreamy, did not hear.  He was gazing into the garden.  From his seat he could see the central clump of verdure, some lofty palms which stood in relief against the grey hangings with which the garden was decorated all round.  A circle of statues was set out there; and you could see the back of a faun; the profile of a young girl with full cheeks; the face of a bronze Gaul, a colossal bit of romanticism which irritated one by its stupid assumption of patriotism; the trunk of a woman hanging by the wrists, some Andromeda of the Place Pigalle; and others, and others still following the bends of the pathways; rows of shoulders and hips, heads, breasts, legs, and arms, all mingling and growing indistinct in the distance.  On the left stretched a line of busts—­such delightful ones—­furnishing a most comical and uncommon suite of noses.  There was the huge pointed nose of a priest, the tip-tilted nose of a soubrette, the handsome classical nose of a fifteenth-century Italian woman, the mere fancy nose of a sailor—­in fact, every kind of nose, both the magistrate’s and the manufacturer’s, and the nose of the gentleman decorated with the Legion of Honour—­all of them motionless and ranged in endless succession!

However, Claude saw nothing of them; to him they were but grey spots in the hazy, greenish light.  His stupor still lasted, and he was only conscious of one thing, the luxuriousness of the women’s dresses, of which he had formed a wrong estimate amid the pushing in the galleries, and which were here freely displayed, as if the wearers had been promenading over the gravel in the conservatory of some chateau.  All the elegance of Paris passed by, the women who had come to show themselves, in dresses thoughtfully combined and destined to be described in the morrow’s newspapers.  People stared a great deal at an actress, who walked about with a queen-like tread,