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Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate cane with a golden

apple on the top of it, was now among the company in the outer

rooms, much prostrated before by mankind--always excepting

superior mankind of the blood of Monseigneur, who, his own wife

included, looked down upon him with the loftiest contempt.

A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood in

his 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.