The guests formed a mixture of races and professions which one would not so easily come across in any other German town. There are so many imported elements in the Strasburg of to-day! They were fourteen in number, the dining-room could seat sixteen with a little over two feet of table for each person, such space being an essential in the eyes of the Geheimrath. He had in his house, around him--and he dominated them with his sad, insipid head--some protégés, people recommended to him, or friends gathered together from various parts of the empire: two Prussian students from the University of Strasburg, then two young Alsatian artists, two painters who had been working for a year at the decoration of a church; these were the unimportant guests, to which we must add the two Oberlés, brother and sister, and even the mother, who was looked upon in the official world as a person of limited intellect. The guests of note were Professor Knäpple, from Mecklenburg, cultured and studious, whose erudition consisted chiefly of minutiæ, and the author of an excellent work on the socialism of Plato. He was the husband of a pretty wife, round and pink, who seemed fairer and pinker by the side of her dark husband, with his black beard curling like an Assyrian's. The Professor of Æsthetics, Baron von Fincken from Baden--who shaved his cheeks and chin, so that the scars gained in the duels of his student days might be better seen, was of a slender, nervous build; his head was of the energetic type, his nose was turned up and showing the cartilage very plainly; ardent, passionate, and very anti-French, and yet he looked more like a Frenchman than any one present, except Jean Oberlé. There was no Madame von Fincken. But there was beautiful Madame Rosenblatt, the woman who was more envied, sought after, looked up to, than any other woman in the German society of Strasburg, even in the military world, because of her beauty and intelligence. She came from Rhenish Prussia, as did also her husband, the great iron-master, Karl Rosenblatt, multi-millionaire, a man of sanguine temperament, and at the same time methodical and silent, and one said that he was bold and cold and calculating in business. This party was like all the parties that the Geheimrath gave; there was no homogeneity. The official himself called that conciliating the different elements of the country. He also spoke of the "neutral ground" of his house and of the "open tribunal," for each and every opinion. But many Alsatians did not trust this eclecticism and this liberty. Some maintained that Herr Brausig was simply playing a part, and that whatever was said in his house was always known in higher spheres.