But the chill, the ceremonious chill, prevailed here no less than at the dinner-table. The guests kept apart in groups, the few ladies in a circle upon low chairs, the gentlemen standing or walking about with a pretence of serious conversation, but obviously engaged in attracting His Highness's attention. It was for His Highness that Landry the musician stood pensive by the chimney-piece, gazing upward with his inspired brow and his apostolic beard; for him that on the other side Delpech the chemist stood meditative with his chin upon his hand, poring intently with gathered brows as if watching the precipitation of a compound.
Laniboire the philosopher, famous for his likeness to Pascal, was wandering round, perpetually passing before the sofa, where, unable to escape from Jean Réhu, sat the Prince. The hostess had forgotten to present him, and his fine nose looked longer than usual and seemed to be making a desperate appeal: 'Cannot you see that this is the nose of Pascal?'
At the same sofa Madame Eviza was shooting between her scarcely parted eyelids a look which asked His Highness to name his own price if he would but be seen at her reception next Monday. Ah! change the scene as you will, it is always the same performance--pretension, meanness, readiness to bow down, the courtier's appetite for self-humiliation and self-abasement. We need not decline the visits of majesty; we are provided with all the properties required for the occasion.
'I shall never be in time for the ballet.'
'I don't know; there's to be a surprise when the Nuncio is gone.'
While these few words passed in an undertone between the pair, they neither looked at each other nor changed a muscle of their ceremonial countenances. The Aide-de-camp had copied from his master the nasal intonation, the absence of gesture, the fixed attitude on the edge of the seat with the bowed arm against the side. He was rigid as on parade or in the Imperial box at the Théâtre Michel. Old Réhu stood before them, he would not sit down; he was still talking, still exhibiting the dusty stores of his memory, the people he had known, the many fashions in which he had dressed. The more distant the time, the clearer his recollection. 'That is a thing I have seen,' says he, as he pauses at the end of a story, with his eyes fixed, as it were, upon the flying past, and then off upon a fresh subject. He had been with Talma at Brunoy, he had been in the drawing-room of Josephine, full of musical boxes and artificial humming-birds covered with jewels, which sang and clapped their wings.