Beside that pontiff with the starched band, old Schwalbach, the famous dealer in pictures, displayed his prophet's beard, yellow in spots like a dirty fleece, his three mouldy-looking waistcoats and all the slovenly, careless attire which people forgave him in the name of art, and because he had the good taste to have in his employ, at a time when the mania for galleries kept millions of money in circulation, the one man who was most expert in negotiating those vainglorious transactions. Schwalbach did not talk, contenting himself with staring about through his enormous lens-shaped monocle, and smiling in his beard at the extraordinary juxtapositions to be observed at that table, which stood alone in all the world. For instance Monpavon had very near him--and you should have seen how the disdainful curve of his nose was accentuated at every glance in his direction--Garrigou the singer, a countryman of Jansoulet, distinguished as a ventriloquist, who sang _Figaro_ in the patois of the South and had not his like for imitating animals. A little farther on, Cabassu, another fellow-countryman, a short, thick-set man, with a bull-neck, a biceps worthy of Michel Angelo, who resembled equally a Marseillais hair-dresser and the Hercules at a country fair, a _masseur_, pedicurist, manicurist and something of a dentist, rested both elbows on the table with the assurance of a quack whom one receives in the morning and who knows the petty weaknesses, the private miseries of the house in which he happens to be. M. Bompain completed that procession of subalterns, all classified with reference to some one specialty. Bompain, the secretary, the steward, the man of confidence, through whose hands all the business of the establishment passed; and a single glance at that stupidly solemn face, that vague expression, that Turkish fez poised awkwardly on that village schoolmaster's head, sufficed to convince one what manner of man he was to whom interests like the Nabob's had been entrusted.