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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 world of

Paris, that the spies among the assembled devotees of

Monseigneurforming a goodly half of the polite company

would have found it hard to discover among the angels of that

sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance,

owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of

bringing a troublesome creature into this worldwhich does not

go far towards the realisation of the name of motherthere was

no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the

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unfashionable babies close, and brought them up, and charming

grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty.

The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in

attendance upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a

dozen exceptional people who had had, for a few years, some

vague misgiving in them that things in general were going rather

wrong. As a promising way of setting them right, half of the halfdozen

had become members of a fantastic sect of Convulsionists,

and were even then considering within themselves whether they

should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on the spotthereby

setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the Future, for

Monseigneur’s guidance. Besides these Dervishes, were other

three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters

with a jargon about “the Centre of Truth:” holding that Man had

got out of the Centre of Truthwhich did not need much

demonstrationbut had not got out of the Circumference, and

that he was to be kept from flying out of the Circumference, and

was even to be shoved back into the Centre, by fasting and seeing

of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much discoursing with spirits