It served as a passage between the brilliantly lighted hothouse and the rooms of the ground-floor, decorated with shrubs and flowers and overflowing with guests. The prettiest women in the American and English colonies were there, extravagantly displaying their wealth of jewels, talking and laughing aloud, with the splendid complexion that characterizes the race. And mingling with them were Russians and Italians and Austrians, all looking alike at the first glance: all different at the second. The ostentations elegance of toilets, all daringly bright-colored, spoke loudly of the preponderance of foreign taste. Evening coats were sprinkled about among these women, worn by all the authentic princes in the wintering-place and also by the society men of the place. All the varieties of the kind were represented there. The most celebrated of sportsmen, renowned for his success as a pigeon shot, elbowed an explorer who had come to Provence in search of rest after five years spent in "Darkest Africa," and both were chatting with a Parisian novelist of the first rank, a Norman Hercules with a faunlike face, contented smile, and laughing eyes, who a few winters later was to die a death worse than death, was to see the wreck of his magnificent intellect. This evening an air of gayety appeared to hang over the salons, lit by innumerable electric lamps and ventilated by the balmy breath of early spring. In a few more days this society would be dispersed to the four corners of the continent. Did the fête owe its animation to this sentiment of a season that was almost finished, to the approach of an adieu soon to be spoken? In any case this spring seemed to have penetrated even as far as the master of the house--the Archduke Henry Francis--in person. It was his first appearance in his wife's salon since the terrible day when he came there in search of Verdier to take him off almost by force to the laboratory. Those who had assisted at his cavalier entrance upon that occasion, and who were again present this evening, Madame de Chésy, for example, Madame Bonnacorsi, Madame Brion, who had come from Monte Carlo for two days, and Hautefeuille, were astounded by the change.