on the top of it, was now among the

company in the outer rooms, much prostrated before by

mankindalways excepting superior mankind of the blood of

Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked down upon him

with the loftiest contempt.

A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood

in his stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six bodywomen

waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing

but plunder and forage where he could, the Farmer-General

howsoever his matrimonial relations conduced to social morality

was at least the greatest reality among the personages who

attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.

For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and

adorned with every device of decoration that the taste and skill of

the time could achieve, were, in truth, not a sound business;

considered with any reference to the scarecrows in the rags and

nightcaps elsewhere (and not so far off, either, but that the

watching towers of Notre Dame, almost equidistant from the two

extremes, could see them both), they would have been an

exceedingly uncomfortable businessif that could have been

anybody’s business, at the house of Monseigneur. Military officers

destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a

ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiast