Following my usual custom, I cast round for someone whom I could bore with my conversation, a fellow-wall-flower; and it was not long before I lit on M. de Présensé, a friend of my guardian, one of those old gentlemen who go everywhere, know everything, talk to everybody, and from whom everyone tries to escape. Delighted to obtain a willing listener, M. de Présensé, who did not dance, drew me into a corner and pointed out the notabilities. We had mounted to a kind of balcony, and presently, when M. de Présensé was engaged in conversation with a lady of his acquaintance, I stood alone and looked down on the assembled guests. Recalling them now, and recalling the Vicomte's strictures, it seems strange enough that amidst the guests were most of those who, fatuously playing into Bismarck's hands, brought war and the destruction of war on France; all, nearly, of the undertakers of the Second Empire's funeral were there. The Duc d'Agenor de Gramont; Benedetti, who happened to be in Paris at that time; Marshal Leboeuf, that ruinous fool the clap of whose portfolio cast on the council table at Saint-Cloud was answered by the mobilisation of the German Army; Vareigne, the Palace Prefect of the Tuileries; and, to complete the collection, Baron Jérome David, destined to be the first recipient of the news of Sedan. I was looking on and listening, amused and interested by old M. de Présensé's descriptions, that were not destitute of barbs and points, when through the crowd in my direction, walking beside my old enemy the Comte de Coigny, came a young man. A young man, pale, very handsome, with an air of distinction which marked him at once as a person above other people, a distinction which, starlike, reduced the surrounding crowd to the level of wax lights and the function of D'Harmonville to a bourgeois rout. He was dressed in simple evening attire, without jewellery or adornment of any description, except an order set in brilliants, a point of sparkling light which gave the last touch to a picture worthy of the brush of Vandyck or Velasquez. "Quick!" I said, plucking old M. Présensé by the sleeve. "That young man with the Comte de Coigny: who is he?" "That!--ma foi--he is Baron Carl von Lichtenberg, the new attaché at the Prussian Embassy. Oh, yes; he is the sensation of the moment in Paris. The women rave about him----" But I did not hear what more the old man may have said, for at that moment Von Lichtenberg, as they called him, looking in my direction, caught my eye and halted dead, with his hand on De Coigny's arm. He seemed stricken with paralysis; the words he had just been saying to his companion withered on his lips; we stared at each other for ten seconds; then De Coigny, glancing in my direction, broke the spell, and, pulling old Présensé by the arm, I retired precipitately through an alcove which led to the cardroom.