“Who is with him?” asked the doctor, indicating the chamber of the duke.

Hardly moving his lips, and not without a slightly ironical glance of the eye, the doorkeeper whispered a name which, if they had heard it, would have roused the indignation of all these high personages who had been waiting for an hour past until the costumier of the opera should have ended his audience.

A sound of voices, a ray of light.  Jenkins had just entered the duke’s presence; he never waited, he.

Standing with his back to the fireplace, closely wrapped in a dressing-jacket of blue fur, the soft reflections from which gave an air of refinement to an energetic and haughty head, the President of the Council was causing to be designed under his eyes a Pierrette costume for the duchess to wear at her next ball, and was giving his directions with the same gravity with which he would have dictated the draft of a new law.

“Let the frill be very fine on the ruff, and put no frills on the sleeves.—­Good-morning, Jenkins.  I am with you directly.”

Jenkins bowed, and took a few steps in the immense room, of which the windows, opening on a garden that extended as far as the Seine, framed one of the finest views of Paris, the bridges, the Tuileries, the Louvre, in a network of black trees traced as it were in Indian ink upon the floating background of fog.  A large and very low bed, raised by a few steps above the floor, two or three little lacquer screens with vague and capricious gilding, indicating, like the double doors and the carpets of thick wool, a fear of cold pushed even to excess, various seats, lounges, warmers, scattered about rather indiscriminately, all low, rounded, indolent, or voluptuous in shape, composed the furniture of this celebrated chamber in which the gravest questions and the most frivolous were wont to be treated alike with the same seriousness.  On the wall was a handsome portrait of the duchess; on the chimneypiece a bust of the duke, the work of Felicia Ruys, which at the recent Salon had received the honours of a first medal.

“Well, Jenkins, how are we this morning?” said his excellency, approaching, while the costumier was picking up his fashion-plates, scattered over all the easy chairs.

“And you, my dear duke?  I thought you a little pale last evening at the Varietes.”

“Come, come!  I have never felt so well.  Your pills have a most marvellous effect upon me.  I am conscious of a vivacity, a freshness, when I remember how run down I was six months ago.”

Jenkins, without saying anything, had laid his great head against the fur-coat of the minister of state, at the place where, in common men, the heart beats.  He listened a moment while his excellency continued to speak in the indolent, bored tone which was one of the characteristics of his distinction.

“And who was your companion, doctor, last night?  That huge, bronzed Tartar who was laughing so loudly in the front of your box.”