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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 business--if 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 ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes,
loose tongues, and looser lives; all totally unfit for their several
callings, all lying horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all
nearly or remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted
on all public employments from which anything was to be got; these 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 time--and has
been since--to 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 Monseigneur--forming 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 world--
which does not go far towards the realisation of the name of mother--
there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the
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

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