 stables,
twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-women waited on his wife.
As one who pretended to do nothing but plunder and forage where he could, the
Farmer-General - howsoever his matrimonial relations conduced to social morality
- was at least the greatest reality among the personages who attended at the
hotel of Monseigneur that day.
    For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and adorned with every
device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could achieve, were,
in truth, not a sound business; considered with any reference to the scarecrows
in the rags and nightcaps elsewhere (and not so far off, either, but that the
watching towers of Notre Dame, almost equidistant from the two extremes, could
see them both), they would have been an exceedingly uncomfortable business - if
that could have been anybody's business, at the house of Monseigneur. Military
officers destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship;
civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst
world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives; all totally
unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in pretending to belong to
them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore
foisted on all public employments from which anything was to be got; these were
to be told off by the score and the score. People not immediately connected with
Monseigneur or the State, yet equally unconnected with anything that was real,
or with lives passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end,
were no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies
for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly patients
in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had discovered every kind of
remedy for the little evils with which the State was touched, except the remedy
of setting to work in earnest to root out a single sin, poured their distracting
babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur.
Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making
card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving Chemists
who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this wonderful gathering
accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding, which
was at that remarkable time - and has been since - to be known by its fruits of
indifference to every natural subject of human interest, were in the most
exemplary state of exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes
