Fashionable Paris, Paris of the turf and of the town, admired the
ineffable waistcoats of this foreign gentleman, his spotless
patent-leather boots, his incomparable sticks, his much-coveted horses,
and the negro servants who rode the horses and who were entirely slaves
and most consumedly thrashed.
His fortune was well known; he had a credit account up to seven
hundred thousand francs in the great banking house of du Tillet; but
he was always seen alone. When he went to "first nights," he was in a
stall. He frequented no drawing-rooms. He had never given his arm to a
girl on the streets. His name would not be coupled with that of any
pretty woman of the world. To pass his time he played whist at the
Jockey-Club. The world was reduced to calumny, or, which it thought
funnier, to laughing at his peculiarities; he went by the name of
Combabus.
Bixiou, Leon de Lora, Lousteau, Florine, Mademoiselle Heloise
Brisetout, and Nathan, supping one evening with the notorious
Carabine, with a large party of _lions_ and _lionesses_, had invented
this name with an excessively burlesque explanation. Massol, as being
on the Council of State, and Claude Vignon, erewhile Professor of
Greek, had related to the ignorant damsels the famous anecdote,
preserved in Rollin's _Ancient History_, concerning Combabus, that
voluntary Abelard who was placed in charge of the wife of a King of
Assyria, Persia, Bactria, Mesopotamia, and other geographical
divisions peculiar to old Professor du Bocage, who continued the work
of d'Anville, the creator of the East of antiquity.
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