all these latter gentlemen were expected to come as bachelors.  Three tickets were to be kept over for presentation to bores endowed with a power of making themselves absolutely unendurable if not admitted at the last moment,—­ and ten were left for the giver of the feast and his own family and friends.  It is often difficult to make things go smooth,—­but almost all roughnesses may be smoothed at last with patience and care, and money, and patronage.

But the dinner was not to be all.  Eight hundred additional tickets were to be issued for Madame Melmotte’s evening entertainment, and the fight for these was more internecine than for seats at the dinner.  The dinner-seats, indeed, were handled in so statesmanlike a fashion that there was not much visible fighting about them.  Royalty manages its affairs...