The plebeian name, accentuated proudly by the liveried servants, and announced in a resounding voice, sounded in Jenkins’s drawing-rooms like the clash of a cymbal, one of those gongs which, in fairy pieces at the theatre, are the prelude to fantastic apparitions. The light of the chandeliers paled, every eye sparkled at the dazzling perspective of the treasures of the Orient, of the showers of the sequins and of pearls evoked by the magic syllables of that name, yesterday unknown. He, it was he himself, the Nabob, the rich among the rich, the great Parisian curiosity, spiced by that relish of adventure which is so pleasing to the surfeited crowd. All heads turned, all conversations were interrupted; near the door there was a pushing among the guests, a crush as upon the quay of a seaport to witness the entry of a felucca laden with gold. Jenkins himself, so hospitable, so self-possessed, who was standing in the first drawing-room receiving his guests, abruptly quitted the group of men about him and hurried to place himself at the head of the galleons bearing down upon the guest. “You are a thousand times, a thousand times kind. Mme. Jenkins will be so glad, so proud.--Come, let me conduct you!” And in his haste, in his vainglorious delight, he bore Jansoulet off so quickly that the latter had no time to present his companion, Paul de Gery, to whom he was giving his first entry into society. The young man welcomed this forgetfulness. He slipped away among the crowd of black dress-coats constantly pressed back at each new arrival, buried himself in it, seized by that wild terror which is experienced by every young man from the country at his first introduction to a Paris drawing-room, especially when he is intelligent and refined, and beneath his breastplate of linen does not wear like a coat of mail the imperturbable assurance of a boor. All you, Parisians of Paris, who from the age of sixteen, in your first dress-coat and with opera-hat against your thigh, have been wont to air your adolescence at receptions of all kinds, you know nothing of that anguish, compounded of vanity, of timidity, of recollections of romantic readings, which keeps a young man from opening his mouth and so makes him awkward and for a whole night pins him down to one spot in a doorway, and converts him into a piece of furniture in a recess, a poor, wandering and wretched being, incapable of manifesting his existence save by an occasional change of place, dying of thirst rather than approach the buffet, and going away without having uttered a word, unless perhaps to stammer out one of those incoherent pieces of foolishness which he remembers for months, and which make him, at night, as he thinks of them, heave an “Ah!” of raging shame, with head buried in the pillow.