Among the households to which the reader is introduced are those of a banker, an aged Countess of the old _noblesse_, a cosmopolitan Princess, of a kind that Paris knows only too well, a scientist, a manufacturer, a working mechanician, a priest, an Anarchist, a petty clerk and an actress of a class that so often dishonours the French stage.

Science and art and learning and religion, all have their representatives.

Then, too, the political world is well to the front.

There are honest and unscrupulous Ministers of State, upright and venal deputies, enthusiastic and cautious candidates for power, together with social theoreticians of various schools.

And the _blase_, weak-minded man of fashion is here, as well as the young "symbolist" of perverted, degraded mind.