Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

were to be told off by the score and the score. People not

immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State, yet equally

unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives passed in

travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were no

less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty

remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon

their courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur.

Projectors who had discovered every kind of remedy for the little

evils with which the State was touched, except the remedy of

setting to work in earnest to root out a single sin, poured their

distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the

reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were

remodelling the world with words, and making card-towers of

Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving Chemists

who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this wonderful

gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of

the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable timeand has

been sinceto be known by its fruits of indifference to every

natural subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary

state of exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had

these various notabilities left behind them in the fine wo