By its constant repetition this phrase “All alone?” had eventually become a jest in the vestibule; lackeys and footmen threw it at each other whenever there entered a new guest “all alone!” And we laughed and were put in good-humour by it.  But M. Nicklauss, with his great experience of the world, deemed this almost general abstention of the fair sex unnatural.

“It must be the article in the Messenger,” said he.

Everybody was talking about it, this rascally article, and before the mirror garlanded with flowers, at which each guest gave a finishing touch to his attire before entering, I surprised fragments of whispered conversation such as this: 

“You have read it?”

“It is horrible!”

“Do you think the thing possible?”

“I have no idea.  In any case, I preferred not to bring my wife.”

“I have done the same.  A man can go everywhere without compromising himself.”

“Certainly.  While a woman——­”

Then they would go in, opera hat under arm, with that conquering air of married men when they are unaccompanied by their wives.

What, then, could there be in this newspaper, this terrible article, to menace to this degree the influence of so wealthy a man?  Unfortunately, my duties took up the whole of my time.  I could go down neither to the pantry nor to the cloak-room to obtain information, to chat with the coachmen and valets and lackeys whom I could see standing at the foot of the staircase, amusing themselves by jests upon the people who were going up.  What will you?  Masters give themselves great airs also.  How not laugh to see go by with an insolent manner and an empty stomach the Marquis and the Marquise de Bois l’Hery, after all that we have been told about the traffickings of Monsieur and the toilettes of Madame?  And the Jenkins couple, so tender, so united, the doctor carefully putting a lace shawl over his lady’s shoulders for fear she should take cold on the staircase; she herself smiling and in full dress, all in velvet, with a great long train, leaning on her husband’s arm with an air that seems to say, “How happy I am!” when I happened to know that, in fact, since the death of the Irishwoman, his real, legitimate wife, the doctor is thinking of getting rid of the old woman who clings to him, in order to be able to marry a chit of a girl, and that the old woman passes her nights in lamentation, and in spoiling with tears whatever beauty she has left.

The humorous thing is that not one of these people had the least suspicion of the rich jests and jeers that were spat over their backs as they passed, not a notion of the filth which those long trains drew after them as they crossed the carpet of the antechamber, and they all would look at you so disdainfully that it was enough to make you die of laughing.