It was an interesting group to watch. Jansoulet, tall and strongly built, with his vulgar manners, his tanned skin, his broad back, bent as if it had become rounded for good and all in the salaams of Oriental sycophancy, his short fat hands bursting through his yellow gloves, his abundant pantomime, his Southern exuberance causing him to cut off his words as if with a machine. The other, of noble birth, a thorough man of the world, elegance itself, graceful in the least of his gestures, which were very rare by the way, negligently letting fall incomplete sentences, lighting up his grave face with a half smile, concealing beneath the most perfect courtesy his boundless contempt for men and women; and that contempt was the main element of his strength. In an American parlor the antithesis would have been less offensive. The Nabob's millions would have established equilibrium and even turned the scale in his favor. But Paris does not as yet place money above all the other powers, and, to be convinced of that fact, one had only to see that stout merchant frisking about with an amiable smile before the great nobleman, and spreading beneath his feet, like the courtier's ermine cloak, his dense parvenu's pride. From the corner in which he had taken refuge, de Gery was watching the scene with interest, knowing what importance his friend attached to this presentation, when chance, which had so cruelly given the lie all the evening to his artless neophyte's ideas, brought to his ears this brief dialogue, in that sea of private conversations in which every one hears just the words that are of interest to him: "The least that Monpavon can do is to introduce him to some decent people. He has introduced him to so many bad ones. You know that he's just tossed Paganetti and his whole crew into his arms." "The poor devil! Why, they'll devour him." "Pshaw! it's only fair to make him disgorge a little. He stole so much down there among the Turks." "Really, do you think so?" "Do I think so! I have some very precise information on that subject from Baron Hemerlingue, the banker who negotiated the last Tunisian loan. He knows some fine stories about this Nabob. Just fancy--"