This fresh internal monologue was almost as distinct as I have written it. This doubling process proved the extreme excitement of my faculties. For my clear, distinct thoughts did not prevent me being all attention to the conversation which was reinforced by the presence of Count and Countess Abel Mosé. He is an accomplished type of the great modern financier. Strange to say, this kind of face which is often met with among the Jews is not displeasing to me. I can see in it the setting of a real passion. For people of this kind the vanity of their club and drawing-room life has at least its realism. In playing the part of the noble host they prove they have mounted one step of the social ladder. The life of fashion is to them a second business, which is in juxtaposition to the other and continues it. It is a step gained; but what a life theirs must be to endure the wear and tear of these two existences, anxious cares alternating with exhausting pleasures, and years made up of days on the Stock Exchange followed by dinners in town. Then, too, Madam Mosé is very beautiful in her oriental fashion, with nothing of the conventional style and irregular features about her! She is the Biblical Judith, the creature with eyes burning like the sands in the desert, over which the soldiers of Holophernes passed. “Who could hate the Hebrews when they have such women?” I said with them. Five minutes afterwards pretty Madam Éthorel entered with her husband; then—“naturally,” as Miraut said between his teeth, to make me understand that he knew the secrets of this society—Crucé the collector; then came Machault, a professional athlete, whom I have seen fence at the School of Arms; then appeared a certain Baron Desforges, a man of sixty, whose eye at once struck me as being almost too acute, and whose colour was too red, like that of a man of the world grown old. The conversation began to buzz, obligatory questions as to the weather and health being mingled with previous scandals and recollections of the day, which were very often full of ennui and simply mentioned for the sake of something to say. I can still hear some of these phrases. “You don’t take enough walking exercise,” Desforges was saying to Mosé, who had declared that he felt a little heavy after a meal. “People digest with their legs, that is what Doctor Noirot is always dinning into my ears.” “But the time?” the financier replied. “Try massage then,” Desforges went on. “I will send Noirot to you. Massage is the essence of exercise.” “You did not buy these two candelabra?” Crucé was saying to Éthorel. “At three thousand francs, my dear fellow, they were being given away.” “You were not skating this morning, Anne, dear,” Madam Mosé was saying to Madam de Bonnivet; “it is a fine chance to take advantage of the early winter. Before the first of January, too! Think of it! It does not happen twice in a century. I looked for you there!”