III

M. de Chatelet--he began life as plain Sixte Chatelet, but since 1806

had the wit to adopt the particle--M. du Chatelet was one of the

agreeable young men who escaped conscription after conscription by

keeping very close to the Imperial sun. He had begun his career as

private secretary to an Imperial Highness, a post for which he

possessed every qualification. Personable and of a good figure, a

clever billiard-player, a passable amateur actor, he danced well, and

excelled in most physical exercises; he could, moreover, sing a ballad

and applaud a witticism. Supple, envious, never at a loss, there was

nothing that he did not know--nothing that he really knew. He knew

nothing, for instance, of music, but he could sit down to the piano

and accompany, after a fashion, a woman who consented after much

pressing to sing a ballad learned by heart in a month of hard

practice. Incapable though he was of any feeling for poetry, he would

boldly ask permission to retire for ten minutes to compose an

impromptu, and return with a quatrain, flat as a pancake, wherein

rhyme did duty for reason. M. du Chatelet had besides a very pretty

talent for filling in the ground of the Princess' worsted work after

the flowers had been begun; he held her skeins of silk with infinite

grace, entertained her with dubious nothings more or less

transparently veiled. He was ignorant of painting, but he could copy a

landscape, sketch a head in profile, or design a costume and color it.

He had, in short, all the little talents that a man could turn to such

useful account in times when women exercised more influence in public

life than most people imagine. Diplomacy he claimed to be his strong

point; it usually is with those who have no knowledge, and are

profound by reason of their emptiness; and, indeed, this kind of skill

possesses one signal advantage, for it can only be displayed in the

conduct of the affairs of the great, and when discretion is the

quality required, a man who knows nothing can safely say nothing, and

take refuge in a mysterious shake of the head; in fact; the cleverest

practitioner is he who can swim with the current and keep his head

well above the stream of events which he appears to control, a man's

fitness for this business varying inversely as his specific gravity.

But in this particular art or craft, as in all others, you shall find

a thousand mediocrities for one man of genius; and in spite of

Chatelet's services, ordinary and extraordinary, Her Imperial Highness

could not procure a seat in the Privy Council for her private

secretary; not that he would not have made a delightful Master of

Requests, like many another, but the Princess was of the opinion that

her secretary was better placed with her than anywhere else in the

world. He was made a Baron, however, and went to Cassel as envoy-

extraordinary, no empty form of words, for he cut a very extraordinary

figure there--Napoleon used him as a diplomatic courier in the thick

of a European crisis. Just as he had been promised the post of

minister to Jerome in Westphalia, the Empire fell to pieces; and

balked of his ambassade de famille as he called it, he went off in

despair to Egypt with General de Montriveau. A strange chapter of

accidents separated him from his traveling companion, and for two long

years Sixte du Chatelet led a wandering life among the Arab tribes of

the desert, who sold and resold their captive--his talents being not

of the slightest use to the nomad tribes. At length, about the time

that Montriveau reached Tangier, Chatelet found himself in the

territory of the Imam of Muscat, had the luck to find an English

vessel just about to set sail, and so came back to Paris a year sooner

than his sometime companion. Once in Paris, his recent misfortunes,

and certain connections of long standing, together with services

rendered to great persons now in power, recommended him to the

President of the Council, who put him in M. de Barante's department

until such time as a controllership should fall vacant. So the part

that M. du Chatelet once had played in the history of the Imperial

Princess, his reputation for success with women, the strange story of

his travels and sufferings, all awakened the interest of the ladies of

Angouleme.

M. le Baron Sixte du Chatelet informed himself as to the manners and

customs of the upper town, and took his cue accordingly. He appeared

on the scene as a jaded man of the world, broken in health, and weary

in spirit. He would raise his hand to his forehead at all seasons, as

if pain never gave him a moment's respite, a habit that recalled his

travels and made him interesting. He was on visiting terms with the

authorities--the general in command, the prefect, the receiver-

general, and the bishop but in every house he was frigid, polite, and

slightly supercilious, like a man out of his proper place awaiting the

favors of power. His social talents he left to conjecture, nor did

they lose anything in reputation on that account; then when people

began to talk about him and wish to know him, and curiosity was still

lively; when he had reconnoitred the men and found them nought, and

studied the women with the eyes of experience in the cathedral for

several Sundays, he saw that Mme. de. Bargeton was the person with

whom it would be best to be on intimate terms. Music, he thought,

should open the doors of a house where strangers were never received.

Surreptitiously he procured one of Miroir's Masses, learned it upon

the piano; and one fine Sunday when all Angouleme went to the

cathedral, he played the organ, sent those who knew no better into

ecstasies over the performance, and stimulated the interest felt in

him by allowing his name to slip out through the attendants. As he

came out after mass, Mme. de Bargeton complimented him, regretting

that she had no opportunity of playing duets with such a musician; and

naturally, during an interview of her own seeking, he received the

passport, which he could not have obtained if he had asked for it.

So the adroit Baron was admitted to the circle of the queen of

Angouleme, and paid her marked attention. The elderly beau--he was

forty-five years old--saw that all her youth lay dormant and ready to

revive, saw treasures to be turned to account, and possibly a rich

widow to wed, to say nothing of expectations; it would be a marriage

into the family of Negrepelisse, and for him this meant a family

connection with the Marquise d'Espard, and a political career in

Paris. Here was a fair tree to cultivate in spite of the ill-omened,

unsightly mistletoe that grew thick upon it; he would hang his

fortunes upon it, and prune it, and wait till he could gather its

golden fruit.

High-born Angouleme shrieked against the introduction of a Giaour into

the sanctuary, for Mme. de Bargeton's salon was a kind of holy of

holies in a society that kept itself unspotted from the world. The

only outsider intimate there was the bishop; the prefect was admitted

twice or thrice in a year, the receiver-general was never received at

all; Mme. de Bargeton would go to concerts and "at homes" at his

house, but she never accepted invitations to dinner. And now, she who

had declined to open her doors to the receiver-general, welcomed a

mere controller of excise! Here was a novel order of precedence for

snubbed authority; such a thing it had never entered their minds to

conceive.

Those who by dint of mental effort can understand a kind of pettiness

which, for that matter, can be found on any and every social level,

will realize the awe with which the bourgeoisie of Angouleme regarded

the Hotel de Bargeton. The inhabitant of L'Houmeau beheld the grandeur

of that miniature Louvre, the glory of the Angoumoisin Hotel de

Rambouillet, shining at a solar distance; and yet, within it there was

gathered together all the direst intellectual poverty, all the decayed

gentility from twenty leagues round about.

Political opinion expanded itself in wordy commonplaces vociferated

with emphasis; the Quotidienne was comparatively Laodicean in its

loyalty, and Louis XVIII. a Jacobin. The women, for the most part,

were awkward, silly, insipid, and ill dressed; there was always

something amiss that spoiled the whole; nothing in them was complete,

toilette or talk, flesh or spirit. But for his designs on Mme. de

Bargeton, Chatelet could not have endured the society. And yet the

manners and spirit of the noble in his ruined manor-house, the

knowledge of the traditions of good breeding,--these things covered a

multitude of deficiencies. Nobility of feeling was far more real here

than in the lofty world of Paris. You might compare these country

Royalists, if the metaphor may be allowed, to old-fashioned silver

plate, antiquated and tarnished, but weighty; their attachment to the

House of Bourbon as the House of Bourbon did them honor. The very

fixity of their political opinions was a sort of faithfulness. The

distance that they set between themselves and the bourgeoisie, their

very exclusiveness, gave them a certain elevation, and enhanced their

value. Each noble represented a certain price for the townsmen, as

Bambara Negroes, we are told, attach a money value to cowrie shells.

Some of the women, flattered by M. du Chatelet, discerned in him the

superior qualities lacking in the men of their own sect, and the

insurrection of self-love was pacified. These ladies all hoped to

succeed to the Imperial Highness. Purists were of the opinion that you

might see the intruder in Mme. de Bargeton's house, but not elsewhere.

Du Chatelet was fain to put up with a good deal of insolence, but he

held his ground by cultivating the clergy. He encouraged the queen of

Angouleme in foibles bred of the soil; he brought her all the newest

books; he read aloud the poetry that appeared. Together they went into

ecstasies over these poets; she in all sincerity, he with suppressed

yawns; but he bore with the Romantics with a patience hardly to be

expected of a man of the Imperial school, who scarcely could make out

what the young writers meant. Not so Mme. de Bargeton; she waxed

enthusiastic over the renaissance, due to the return of the Bourbon

Lilies; she loved M. de Chateaubriand for calling Victor Hugo "a

sublime child." It depressed her that she could only know genius from

afar, she sighed for Paris, where great men live. For these reasons M.

du Chatelet thought he had done a wonderfully clever thing when he

told the lady that at that moment in Angouleme there was "another

sublime child," a young poet, a rising star whose glory surpassed the

whole Parisian galaxy, though he knew it not. A great man of the

future had been born in L'Houmeau! The headmaster of the school had

shown the Baron some admirable verses. The poor and humble lad was a

second Chatterton, with none of the political baseness and ferocious

hatred of the great ones of earth that led his English prototype to

turn pamphleteer and revile his benefactors. Mme. de Bargeton in her

little circle of five or six persons, who were supposed to share her

tastes for art and letters, because this one scraped a fiddle, and

that splashed sheets of white paper, more or less, with sepia, and the

other was president of a local agricultural society, or was gifted

with a bass voice that rendered Se fiato in corpo like a war whoop--

Mme. de Bargeton amid these grotesque figures was like a famished

actor set down to a stage dinner of pasteboard. No words, therefore,

can describe her joy at these tidings. She must see this poet, this

angel! She raved about him, went into raptures, talked of him for

whole hours together. Before two days were out the sometime diplomatic

courier had negotiated (through the headmaster) for Lucien's

appearance in the Hotel de Bargeton.

Poor helots of the provinces, for whom the distances between class and

class are so far greater than for the Parisian (for whom, indeed,

these distances visibly lessen day by day); souls so grievously

oppressed by the social barriers behind which all sorts and conditions

of men sit crying Raca! with mutual anathemas--you, and you alone,

will fully comprehend the ferment in Lucien's heart and brain, when

his awe-inspiring headmaster told him that the great gates of the

Hotel de Bargeton would shortly open and turn upon their hinges at his

fame! Lucien and David, walking together of an evening in the

Promenade de Beaulieu, had looked up at the house with the old-

fashioned gables, and wondered whether their names would ever so much

as reach ears inexorably deaf to knowledge that came from a lowly

origin; and now he (Lucien) was to be made welcome there!

No one except his sister was in the secret. Eve, like the thrifty

housekeeper and divine magician that she was, conjured up a few louis

d'or from her savings to buy thin shoes for Lucien of the best

shoemaker in Angouleme, and an entirely new suit of clothes from the

most renowned tailor. She made a frill for his best shirt, and washed

and pleated it with her own hands. And how pleased she was to see him

so dressed! How proud she felt of her brother, and what quantities of

advice she gave him! Her intuition foresaw countless foolish fears.

Lucien had a habit of resting his elbows on the table when he was in

deep thought; he would even go so far as to draw a table nearer to

lean upon it; Eve told him that he must not forget himself in those

aristocratic precincts.

She went with him as far as St. Peter's Gate, and when they were

almost opposite the cathedral she stopped, and watched him pass down

the Rue de Beaulieu to the Promenade, where M. du Chatelet was waiting

for him. And after he was out of sight, she still stood there, poor

girl! in a great tremor of emotion, as though some great thing had

happened to them. Lucien in Mme. de Bargeton's house!--for Eve it

meant the dawn of success. The innocent creature did not suspect that

where ambition begins, ingenuous feeling ends.

Externals in the Rue du Minage gave Lucien no sense of surprise. This

palace, that loomed so large in his imagination, was a house built of

the soft stone of the country, mellowed by time. It looked dismal

enough from the street, and inside it was extremely plain; there was

the usual provincial courtyard--chilly, prim, and neat; and the house

itself was sober, almost convent-like, but in good repair.

Lucien went up the old staircase with the balustrade of chestnut wood

(the stone steps ceased after the second floor), crossed a shabby

antechamber, and came into the presence in a little wainscoted

drawing-room, beyond a dimly-lit salon. The carved woodwork, in the

taste of the eighteenth century, had been painted gray. There were

monochrome paintings on the frieze panels, and the walls were adorned

with crimson damask with a meagre border. The old-fashioned furniture

shrank piteously from sight under covers of a red-and-white check

pattern. On the sofa, covered with thin mattressed cushions, sat Mme.

de Bargeton; the poet beheld her by the light of two wax candles on a

sconce with a screen fitted to it, that stood before her on a round

table with a green cloth.

The queen did not attempt to rise, but she twisted very gracefully on

her seat, smiling on the poet, who was not a little fluttered by the

serpentine quiverings; her manner was distinguished, he thought. For

Mme. de Bargeton, she was impressed with Lucien's extreme beauty, with

his diffidence, with everything about him; for her the poet already

was poetry incarnate. Lucien scrutinized his hostess with discreet

side glances; she disappointed none of his expectations of a great

lady.

Mme. de Bargeton, following a new fashion, wore a coif of slashed

black velvet, a head-dress that recalls memories of mediaeval legend

to a young imagination, to amplify, as it were, the dignity of

womanhood. Her red-gold hair, escaping from under her cap, hung loose;

bright golden color in the light, red in the rounded shadow of the

curls that only partially hid her neck. Beneath a massive white brow,

clean cut and strongly outlined, shone a pair of bright gray eyes

encircled by a margin of mother-of-pearl, two blue veins on each side

of the nose bringing out the whiteness of that delicate setting. The

Bourbon curve of the nose added to the ardent expression of an oval

face; it was as if the royal temper of the House of Conde shone

conspicuous in this feature. The careless cross-folds of the bodice

left a white throat bare, and half revealed the outlines of a still

youthful figure and shapely, well placed contours beneath.

With fingers tapering and well-kept, though somewhat too thin, Mme. de

Bargeton amiably pointed to a seat by her side, M. du Chatelet

ensconced himself in an easy-chair, and Lucien then became aware that

there was no one else in the room.

Mme. de Bargeton's words intoxicated the young poet from L'Houmeau.

For Lucien those three hours spent in her presence went by like a

dream that we would fain have last forever. She was not thin, he

thought; she was slender; in love with love, and loverless; and

delicate in spite of her strength. Her foibles, exaggerated by her

manner, took his fancy; for youth sets out with a love of hyperbole,

that infirmity of noble souls. He did not so much as see that her

cheeks were faded, that the patches of color on the cheek-bone were

faded and hardened to a brick-red by listless days and a certain

amount of ailing health. His imagination fastened at once on the

glowing eyes, on the dainty curls rippling with light, on the dazzling

fairness of her skin, and hovered about those bright points as the

moth hovers about the candle flame. For her spirit made such appeal to

his that he could no longer see the woman as she was. Her feminine

exaltation had carried him away, the energy of her expressions, a

little staled in truth by pretty hard and constant wear, but new to

Lucien, fascinated him so much the more easily because he was

determined to be pleased. He had brought none of his own verses to

read, but nothing was said of them; he had purposely left them behind

because he meant to return; and Mme. de Bargeton did not ask for them,

because she meant that he should come back some future day to read

them to her. Was not this a beginning of an understanding?

As for M. Sixte du Chatelet, he was not over well pleased with all

this. He perceived rather too late in the day that he had a rival in

this handsome young fellow. He went with him as far as the first

flight of steps below Beaulieu to try the effect of a little

diplomacy; and Lucien was not a little astonished when he heardthe

controller of excise pluming himself on having effected the

introduction, and proceeding in this character to give him (Lucien)

the benefit of his advice.

"Heaven send that Lucien might meet with better treatment than he had

done," such was the matter of M. du Chatelet's discourse. "The Court

was less insolent that this pack of dolts in Angouleme. You were

expected to endure deadly insults; the superciliousness you had to put

up with was something abominable. If this kind of folk did not alter

their behavior, there would be another Revolution of '89. As for

himself, if he continued to go to the house, it was because he had

found Mme. de Bargeton to his taste; she was the only woman worth

troubling about in Angouleme; he had been paying court to her for want

of anything better to do, and now he was desperately in love with her.

She would be his before very long, she loved him, everything pointed

that way. The conquest of this haughty queen of the society would be

his one revenge on the whole houseful of booby clodpates."

Chatelet talked of his passion in the tone of a man who would have a

rival's life if he crossed his path. The elderly butterfly of the

Empire came down with his whole weight on the poor poet, and tried to

frighten and crush him by his self-importance. He grew taller as he

gave an embellished account of his perilous wanderings; but while he

impressed the poet's imagination, the lover was by no means afraid of

him.

In spite of the elderly coxcomb, and regardless of his threats and

airs of a bourgeois bravo, Lucien went back again and again to the

house--not too often at first, as became a man of L'Houmeau; but

before very long he grew accustomed to the vast condescension, as it

had seemed to him at the outset, and came more and more frequently.

The druggist's son was a completely insignificant being. If any of the

noblesse, men or women, calling upon Nais, found Lucien in the room,

they met him with the overwhelming graciousness that well-bred people

use towards their inferiors. Lucien thought them very kind for a time,

and later found out the real reason for their specious amiability. It

was not long before he detected a patronizing tone that stirred his

gall and confirmed him in his bitter Republicanism, a phase of opinion

through which many a would-be patrician passes by way of prelude to

his introduction to polite society.

But was there anything that he would not have endured for Nais?--for

so he heard her named by the clan. Like Spanish grandees and the old

Austrian nobility at Vienna, these folk, men and women alike, called

each other by their Christian names, a final shade of distinction in

the inmost ring of Angoumoisin aristocracy.

Lucien loved Nais as a young man loves the first woman who flatters

him, for Nais prophesied great things and boundless fame for Lucien.

She used all her skill to secure her hold upon her poet; not merely

did she exalt him beyond measure, but she represented him to himself

as a child without fortune whom she meant to start in life; she

treated him like a child, to keep him near her; she made him her

reader, her secretary, and cared more for him than she would have

thought possible after the dreadful calamity that had befallen her.

She was very cruel to herself in those days, telling herself that it

would be folly to love a young man of twenty, so far apart from her

socially in the first place; and her behavior to him was a bewildering

mixture of familiarity and capricious fits of pride arising from her

fears and scruples. She was sometimes a lofty patroness, sometimes she

was tender and flattered him. At first, while he was overawed by her

rank, Lucien experienced the extremes of dread, hope, and despair, the

torture of a first love, that is beaten deep into the heart with the

hammer strokes of alternate bliss and anguish. For two months Mme. de

Bargeton was for him a benefactress who would take a mother's interest

in him; but confidences came next. Mme. de Bargeton began to address

her poet as "dear Lucien," and then as "dear," without more ado. The

poet grew bolder, and addressed the great lady as Nais, and there

followed a flash of anger that captivates a boy; she reproached him

for calling her by a name in everybody's mouth. The haughty and high-

born Negrepelisse offered the fair angel youth that one of her

appellations which was unsoiled by use; for him she would be "Louise."

Lucien was in the third heaven.

One evening when Lucien came in, he found Mme. de Bargeton looking at

a portrait, which she promptly put away. He wished to see it, and to

quiet the despair of a first fit of jealousy Louise showed him Cante-

Croix's picture, and told with tears the piteous story of a love so

stainless, so cruelly cut short. Was she experimenting with herself?

Was she trying a first unfaithfulness to the memory of the dead? Or

had she taken it into her head to raise up a rival to Lucien in the

portrait? Lucien was too much of a boy to analyze his lady-love; he

gave way to unfeigned despair when she opened the campaign by

entrenching herself behind the more or less skilfully devised scruples

which women raise to have them battered down. When a woman begins to

talk about her duty, regard for appearances or religion, the

objections she raises are so many redoubts which she loves to have

carried by storm. But on the guileless Lucien these coquetries were

thrown away; he would have advanced of his own accord.

"_I_ shall not die for you, I will live for you," he cried audaciously

one evening; he meant to have no more of M. de Cante-Croix, and gave

Louise a glance which told plainly that a crisis was at hand.

Startled at the progress of this new love in herself and her poet,

Louise demanded some verses promised for the first page of her album,

looking for a pretext for a quarrel in his tardiness. But what became

of her when she read the following stanzas, which, naturally, she

considered finer than the finest work of Canalis, the poet of the

aristocracy?--

The magic brush, light flying flights of song--

To these, but not to these alone, belong

My pages fair;

Often to me, my mistress' pencil steals

To tell the secret gladness that she feels,

The hidden care.

And when her fingers, slowlier at the last,

Of a rich Future, now become the Past,

Seek count of me,

Oh Love, when swift, thick-coming memories rise,

I pray of Thee.

May they bring visions fair as cloudless skies

Of happy voyage o'er a summer sea!

"Was it really I who inspired those lines?" she asked.

The doubt suggested by coquetry to a woman who amused herself by

playing with fire brought tears to Lucien's eyes; but her first kiss

upon his forehead calmed the storm. Decidedly Lucien was a great man,

and she meant to form him; she thought of teaching him Italian and

German and perfecting his manners. That would be pretext sufficient

for having him constantly with her under the very eyes of her tiresome

courtiers. What an interest in her life! She took up music again for

her poet's sake, and revealed the world of sound to him, playing grand

fragments of Beethoven till she sent him into ecstasy; and, happy in

his delight, turned to the half-swooning poet.

"Is not such happiness as this enough?" she asked hypocritically; and

poor Lucien was stupid enough to answer, "Yes."

In the previous week things had reached such a point, that Louise had

judged it expedient to ask Lucien to dine with M. de Bargeton as a

third. But in spite of this precaution, the whole town knew the state

of affairs; and so extraordinary did it appear, that no one would

believe the truth. The outcry was terrific. Some were of the opinion

that society was on the eve of cataclysm. "See what comes of Liberal

doctrines!" cried others.

Then it was that the jealous du Chatelet discovered that Madame

Charlotte, the monthly nurse, was no other than Mme. Chardon, "the

mother of the Chateaubriand of L'Houmeau," as he put it. The remark

passed muster as a joke. Mme. de Chandour was the first to hurry to

Mme. de Bargeton.

"Nais, dear," she said, "do you know what everybody is talking about

in Angouleme? This little rhymster's mother is the Madame Charlotte

who nursed my sister-in-law through her confinement two months ago."

"What is there extraordinary in that, my dear?" asked Mme. de Bargeton

with her most regal air. "She is a druggist's widow, is she not? A

poor fate for a Rubempre. Suppose that you and I had not a penny in

the world, what should either of us do for a living? How would you

support your children?"

Mme. de Bargeton's presence of mind put an end to the jeremiads of the

noblesse. Great natures are prone to make a virtue of misfortune; and

there is something irresistibly attractive about well-doing when

persisted in through evil report; innocence has the piquancy of the

forbidden.

Mme. de Bargeton's rooms were crowded that evening with friends who

came to remonstrate with her. She brought her most caustic wit into

play. She said that as noble families could not produce a Moliere, a

Racine, a Rousseau, a Voltaire, a Massillon, a Beaumarchais, or a

Diderot, people must make up their minds to it, and accept the fact

that great men had upholsterers and clockmakers and cutlers for their

fathers. She said that genius was always noble. She railed at boorish

squires for understanding their real interests so imperfectly. In

short, she talked a good deal of nonsense, which would have let the

light into heads less dense, but left her audience agape at her

eccentricity. And in these ways she conjured away the storm with her

heavy artillery.

When Lucien, obedient to her request, appeared for the first time in

the faded great drawing-room, where the whist-tables were set out, she

welcomed him graciously, and brought him forward, like a queen who

means to be obeyed. She addressed the controller of excise as "M.

Chatelet," and left that gentleman thunderstruck by the discovery that

she knew about the illegal superfetation of the particle. Lucien was

forced upon her circle, and was received as a poisonous element, which

every person in it vowed to expel with the antidote of insolence.

Nais had won a victory, but she had lost her supremacy of empire.

There was a rumor of insurrection. Amelie, otherwise Mme. de Chandour,

harkening to "M. Chatelet's" counsels, determined to erect a rival

altar by receiving on Wednesdays. Now Mme. de Bargeton's salon was

open every evening; and those who frequented it were so wedded to

their ways, so accustomed to meet about the same tables, to play the

familiar game of backgammon, to see the same faces and the same candle

sconces night after night; and afterwards to cloak and shawl, and put

on overshoes and hats in the old corridor, that they were quite as

much attached to the steps of the staircase as to the mistress of the

house.

"All resigned themselves to endure the songster" (chardonneret) "of

the sacred grove," said Alexandre de Brebian, which was witticism

number two. Finally, the president of the agricultural society put an

end to the sedition by remarking judicially that "before the

Revolution the greatest nobles admitted men like Dulcos and Grimm and

Crebillon to their society--men who were nobodies, like this little

poet of L'Houmeau; but one thing they never did, they never received

tax-collectors, and, after all, Chatelet is only a tax-collector."

Du Chatelet suffered for Chardon. Every one turned the cold shoulder

upon him; and Chatelet was conscious that he was attacked. When Mme.

de Bargeton called him "M. Chatelet," he swore to himself that he

would possess her; and now he entered into the views of the mistress

of the house, came to the support of the young poet, and declared

himself Lucien's friend. The great diplomatist, overlooked by the

shortsighted Emperor, made much of Lucien, and declared himself his

friend! To launch the poet into society, he gave a dinner, and asked

all the authorities to meet him--the prefect, the receiver-general,

the colonel in command of the garrison, the head of the Naval School,

the president of the Court, and so forth. The poet, poor fellow, was

feted so magnificently, and so belauded, that anybody but a young man

of two-and-twenty would have shrewdly suspected a hoax. After dinner,

Chatelet drew his rival on to recite The Dying Sardanapalus, the

masterpiece of the hour; and the headmaster of the school, a man of a

phlegmatic temperament, applauded with both hands, and vowed that

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau had done nothing finer. Sixte, Baron du

Chatelet, thought in his heart that this slip of a rhymster would

wither incontinently in a hothouse of adulation; perhaps he hoped that

when the poet's head was turned with brilliant dreams, he would

indulge in some impertinence that would promptly consign him to the

obscurity from which he had emerged. Pending the decease of genius,

Chatelet appeared to offer up his hopes as a sacrifice at Mme. de

Bargeton's feet; but with the ingenuity of a rake, he kept his own

plan in abeyance, watching the lovers' movements with keenly critical

eyes, and waiting for the opportunity of ruining Lucien.

From this time forward, vague rumors reported the existence of a great

man in Angoumois. Mme. de Bargeton was praised on all sides for the

interest which she took in this young eagle. No sooner was her conduct

approved than she tried to win a general sanction. She announced a

soiree, with ices, tea, and cakes, a great innovation in a city where

tea, as yet, was sold only by druggists as a remedy for indigestion.

The flower of Angoumoisin aristocracy was summoned to hear Lucien read

his great work. Louise had hidden all the difficulties from her

friend, but she let fall a few words touching the social cabal formed

against him; she would not have him ignorant of the perils besetting

his career as a man of genius, nor of the obstacles insurmountable to

weaklings. She drew a lesson from the recent victory. Her white hands

pointed him to glory that lay beyond a prolonged martyrdom; she spoke

of stakes and flaming pyres; she spread the adjectives thickly on her

finest tartines, and decorated them with a variety of her most pompous

epithets. It was an infringement of the copyright of the passages of

declamation that disfigure Corinne; but Louise grew so much the

greater in her own eyes as she talked, that she loved the Benjamin who

inspired her eloquence the more for it. She counseled him to take a

bold step and renounce his patronymic for the noble name of Rubempre;

he need not mind the little tittle-tattle over a change which the

King, for that matter, would authorize. Mme. de Bargeton undertook to

procure this favor; she was related to the Marquise d'Espard, who was

a Blamont-Chauvry before her marriage, and a persona grata at Court.

The words "King," "Marquise d'Espard," and "the Court" dazzled Lucien

like a blaze of fireworks, and the necessity of the baptism was plain

to him.

"Dear child," said Louise, with tender mockery in her tones, "the

sooner it is done, the sooner it will be sanctioned."

She went through social strata and showed the poet that this step

would raise him many rungs higher in the ladder. Seizing the moment,

she persuaded Lucien to forswear the chimerical notions of '89 as to

equality; she roused a thirst for social distinction allayed by

David's cool commonsense; she pointed out fashionable society as the

goal and the only stage for such a talent as his. The rabid Liberal

became a Monarchist in petto; Lucien set his teeth in the apple of

desire of rank, luxury, and fame. He swore to win a crown to lay at

his lady's feet, even if there should be blood-stains on the bays. He

would conquer at any cost, quibuscumque viis. To prove his courage, he

told her of his present way of life; Louise had known nothing of its

hardships, for there is an indefinable pudency inseparable from strong

feeling in youth, a delicacy which shrinks from a display of great

qualities; and a young man loves to have the real quality of his

nature discerned through the incognito. He described that life, the

shackles of poverty borne with pride, his days of work for David, his

nights of study. His young ardor recalled memories of the colonel of

six-and-twenty; Mme. de Bargeton's eyes grew soft; and Lucien, seeing

this weakness in his awe-inspiring mistress, seized a hand that she

had abandoned to him, and kissed it with the frenzy of a lover and a

poet in his youth. Louise even allowed him to set his eager, quivering

lips upon her forehead.

"Oh, child! child! if any one should see us, I should look very

ridiculous," she said, shaking off the ecstatic torpor.

In the course of that evening, Mme. de Bargeton's wit made havoc of

Lucien's prejudices, as she styled them. Men of genius, according to

her doctrine, had neither brothers nor sisters nor father nor mother;

the great tasks laid upon them required that they should sacrifice

everything that they might grow to their full stature. Perhaps their

families might suffer at first from the all-absorbing exactions of a

giant brain, but at a later day they were repaid a hundredfold for

self-denial of every kind during the early struggles of the kingly

intellect with adverse fate; they shared the spoils of victory. Genius

was answerable to no man. Genius alone could judge of the means used

to an end which no one else could know. It was the duty of a man of

genius, therefore, to set himself above law; it was his mission to

reconstruct law; the man who is master of his age may take all that he

needs, run any risks, for all is his. She quoted instances. Bernard

Palissy, Louis XI., Fox, Napoleon, Christopher Columbus, and Julius

Caesar,--all these world-famous gamblers had begun life hampered with

debt, or as poor men; all of them had been misunderstood, taken for

madmen, reviled for bad sons, bad brothers, bad fathers; and yet in

after life each one had come to be the pride of his family, of his

country, of the civilized world.

Her arguments fell upon fertile soil in the worst of Lucien's nature,

and spread corruption in his heart; for him, when his desires were

hot, all means were admissible. But--failure is high treason against

society; and when the fallen conqueror has run amuck through bourgeois

virtues, and pulled down the pillars of society, small wonder that

society, finding Marius seated among the ruins, should drive him forth

in abhorrence. All unconsciously Lucien stood with the palm of genius

on the one hand and a shameful ending in the hulks upon the other;

and, on high upon the Sinai of the prophets, beheld no Dead Sea

covering the cities of the plain--the hideous winding-sheet of

Gomorrah.

So well did Louise loosen the swaddling-bands of provincial life that

confined the heart and brain of her poet that the said poet determined

to try an experiment upon her. He wished to feel certain that this

proud conquest was his without laying himself open to the

mortification of a rebuff. The forthcoming soiree gave him his

opportunity. Ambition blended with his love. He loved, and he meant to

rise, a double desire not unnatural in young men with a heart to

satisfy and the battle of life to fight. Society, summoning all her

children to one banquet, arouses ambition in the very morning of life.

Youth is robbed of its charm, and generous thoughts are corrupted by

mercenary scheming. The idealist would fain have it otherwise, but

intrusive fact too often gives the lie to the fiction which we should

like to believe, making it impossible to paint the young man of the

nineteenth century other than he is. Lucien imagined that his scheming

was entirely prompted by good feeling, and persuaded himself that it

was done solely for his friend David's sake.

He wrote a long letter to his Louise; he felt bolder, pen in hand,

than face to face. In a dozen sheets, copied out three several times,

he told her of his father's genius and blighted hopes and of his

grinding poverty. He described his beloved sister as an angel, and

David as another Cuvier, a great man of the future, and a father,

friend, and brother to him in the present. He should feel himself

unworthy of his Louise's love (his proudest distinction) if he did not

ask her to do for David all that she had done for him. He would give

up everything rather than desert David Sechard; David must witness his

success. It was one of those wild letters in which a young man points

a pistol at a refusal, letters full of boyish casuistry and the

incoherent reasoning of an idealist; a delicious tissue of words

embroidered here and there by the naive utterances that women love so

well--unconscious revelations of the writer's heart.

Lucien left the letter with the housemaid, went to the office, and

spent the day in reading proofs, superintending the execution of

orders, and looking after the affairs of the printing-house. He said

not a word to David. While youth bears a child's heart, it is capable

of sublime reticence. Perhaps, too, Lucien began to dread the

Phocion's axe which David could wield when he chose, perhaps he was

afraid to meet those clear-sighted eyes that read the depths of his

soul. But when he read Chenier's poems with David, his secret rose

from his heart to his lips at the sting of a reproach that he felt as

the patient feels the probing of a wound.

And now try to understand the thoughts that troubled Lucien's mind as

he went down from Angouleme. Was the great lady angry with him? Would

she receive David? Had he, Lucien, in his ambition, flung himself

headlong back into the depths of L'Houmeau? Before he set that kiss on

Louise's forehead, he had had time to measure the distance between a

queen and her favorite, so far had he come in five months, and he did

not tell himself that David could cross over the same ground in a

moment. Yet he did not know how completely the lower orders were

excluded from this upper world; he did not so much as suspect that a

second experiment of this kind meant ruin for Mme. de Bargeton. Once

accused and fairly convicted of a liking for canaille, Louise would be

driven from the place, her caste would shun her as men shunned a leper

in the Middle Ages. Nais might have broken the moral law, and her

whole circle, the clergy and the flower of the aristocracy, would have

defended her against the world through thick and then; but a breach of

another law, the offence of admitting all sorts of people to her house

--this was sin without remission. The sins of those in power are

always overlooked--once let them abdicate, and they shall pay the

penalty. And what was it but abdication to receive David?

But if Lucien did not see these aspects of the question, his

aristocratic instinct discerned plenty of difficulties of another

kind, and he took alarm. A fine manner is not the invariable outcome

of noble feeling; and while no man at court had a nobler air than

Racine, Corneille looked very much like a cattle-dealer, and Descartes

might have been taken for an honest Dutch merchant; and visitors to La

Brede, meeting Montesquieu in a cotton nightcap, carrying a rake over

his shoulder, mistook him for a gardener. A knowledge of the world,

when it is not sucked in with mother's milk and part of the

inheritance of descent, is only acquired by education, supplemented by

certain gifts of chance--a graceful figure, distinction of feature, a

certain ring in the voice. All these, so important trifles, David

lacked, while Nature had bestowed them upon his friend. Of gentle

blood on the mother's side, Lucien was a Frank, even down to the high-

arched instep. David had inherited the physique of his father the

pressman and the flat foot of the Gael. Lucien could hear the shower

of jokes at David's expense; he could see Mme. de Bargeton's repressed

smile; and at length, without being exactly ashamed of his brother, he

made up his mind to disregard his first impulse and to think twice

before yielding to it in future.

So, after the hour of poetry and self-sacrifice, after the reading of

verse that opened out before the friends the fields of literature in

the light of a newly-risen sun, the hour of worldly wisdom and of

scheming struck for Lucien.

Down once more in L'Houmeau he wished that he had not written that

letter; he wished he could have it back again; for down the vista of

the future he caught a glimpse of the inexorable laws of the world. He

guessed that nothing succeeds like success, and it cost him something

to step down from the first rung of the scaling ladder by which he

meant to reach and storm the heights above. Pictures of his quiet and

simple life rose before him, pictures fair with the brightest colors

of blossoming love. There was David; what a genius David had--David

who had helped him so generously, and would die for him at need; he

thought of his mother, of how great a lady she was in her lowly lot,

and how she thought that he was as good as he was clever; then of his

sister so gracious in submission to her fate, of his own innocent

childhood and conscience as yet unstained, of budding hopes

undespoiled by rough winds, and at these thoughts the past broke into

flowers once more for his memory.

Then he told himself that it was a far finer thing to hew his own way

through serried hostile mobs of aristocrats or philistines by repeated

successful strokes, than to reach the goal through a woman's favor.

Sooner or later his genius should shine out; it had been so with the

others, his predecessors; they had tamed society. Women would love him

when that day came! The example of Napoleon, which, unluckily for this

nineteenth century of ours, has filled a great many ordinary persons

with aspirations after extraordinary destinies,--the example of

Napoleon occurred to Lucien's mind. He flung his schemes to the winds

and blamed himself for thinking of them. For Lucien was so made that

he went from evil to good, or from good to evil, with the same

facility.

Lucien had none of the scholar's love for his retreat; for the past

month indeed he had felt something like shame at the sight of the shop

front, where you could read--

POSTEL (LATE CHARDON), PHARMACEUTICAL CHEMIST,

in yellow letters on a green ground. It was an offence to him that his

father's name should be thus posted up in a place where every carriage

passed.

Every evening, when he closed the ugly iron gate and went up to

Beaulieu to give his arm to Mme. de Bargeton among the dandies of the

upper town, he chafed beyond all reason at the disparity between his

lodging and his fortune.

"I love Mme. de Bargeton; perhaps in a few days she will be mine, yet

here I live in this rat-hole!" he said to himself this evening, as he

went down the narrow passage into the little yard behind the shop.

This evening bundles of boiled herbs were spread out along the wall,

the apprentice was scouring a caldron, and M. Postel himself, girded

about with his laboratory apron, was standing with a retort in his

hand, inspecting some chemical product while keeping an eye upon the

shop door, or if the eye happened to be engaged, he had at any rate an

ear for the bell.

A strong scent of camomile and peppermint pervaded the yard and the

poor little dwelling at the side, which you reached by a short ladder,

with a rope on either side by way of hand-rail. Lucien's room was an

attic just under the roof.

"Good-day, sonny," said M. Postel, that typical, provincial tradesman.

"Are you pretty middling? I have just been experimenting on treacle,

but it would take a man like your father to find what I am looking

for. Ah! he was a famous chemist, he was! If I had only known his gout

specific, you and I should be rolling along in our carriage this day."

The little druggist, whose head was as thick as his heart was kind,

never let a week pass without some allusion to Chardon senior's

unlucky secretiveness as to that discovery, words that Lucien felt

like a stab.

"It is a great pity," Lucien answered curtly. He was beginning to

think his father's apprentice prodigiously vulgar, though he had

blessed the man for his kindness, for honest Postel had helped his

master's widow and children more than once.

"Why, what is the matter with you?" M. Postel inquired, putting down

his test tube on the laboratory table.

"Is there a letter for me?"

"Yes, a letter that smells like balm! it is lying on the corner near

my desk."

Mme. de Bargeton's letter lying among the physic bottles in a

druggist's shop! Lucien sprang in to rescue it.

"Be quick, Lucien! your dinner has been waiting an hour for you, it

will be cold!" a sweet voice called gently through a half-opened

window; but Lucien did not hear.

"That brother of yours has gone crazy, mademoiselle," said Postel,

lifting his face.

The old bachelor looked rather like a miniature brandy cask,

embellished by a painter's fancy, with a fat, ruddy countenance much

pitted with the smallpox; at the sight of Eve his face took a

ceremonious and amiable expression, which said plainly that he had

thoughts of espousing the daughter of his predecessor, but could not

put an end to the strife between love and interest in his heart. He

often said to Lucien, with a smile, "Your sister is uncommonly pretty,

and you are not so bad looking neither! Your father did everything

well."

Eve was tall, dark-haired, dark of complexion, and blue-eyed; but

notwithstanding these signs of virile character, she was gentle,

tender-hearted, and devoted to those she loved. Her frank innocence,

her simplicity, her quiet acceptance of a hard-working life, her

character--for her life was above reproach--could not fail to win

David Sechard's heart. So, since the first time that these two had

met, a repressed and single-hearted love had grown up between them in

the German fashion, quietly, with no fervid protestations. In their

secret souls they thought of each other as if there were a bar between

that kept them apart; as if the thought were an offence against some

jealous husband; and hid their feelings from Lucien as though their

love in some way did him a wrong. David, moreover, had no confidence

in himself, and could not believe that Eve could care for him; Eve was

a penniless girl, and therefore shy. A real work-girl would have been

bolder; but Eve, gently bred, and fallen into poverty, resigned

herself to her dreary lot. Diffident as she seemed, she was in reality

proud, and would not make a single advance towards the son of a father

said to be rich. People who knew the value of a growing property, said

that the vineyard at Marsac was worth more than eighty thousand

francs, to say nothing of the traditional bits of land which old

Sechard used to buy as they came into the market, for old Sechard had

savings--he was lucky with his vintages, and a clever salesman.

Perhaps David was the only man in Angouleme who knew nothing of his

father's wealth. In David's eyes Marsac was a hovel bought in 1810 for

fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, a place that he saw once a year at

vintage time when his father walked him up and down among the vines

and boasted of an output of wine which the young printer never saw,

and he cared nothing about it.

David was a student leading a solitary life; and the love that gained

even greater force in solitude, as he dwelt upon the difficulties in

the way, was timid, and looked for encouragement; for David stood more

in awe of Eve than a simple clerk of some high-born lady. He was

awkward and ill at ease in the presence of his idol, and as eager to

hurry away as he had been to come. He repressed his passion, and was

silent. Often of an evening, on some pretext of consulting Lucien, he

would leave the Place du Murier and go down through the Palet Gate as

far as L'Houmeau, but at the sight of the green iron railings his

heart failed. Perhaps he had come too late, Eve might think him a

nuisance; she would be in bed by this time no doubt; and so he turned

back. But though his great love had only appeared in trifles, Eve read

it clearly; she was proud, without a touch of vanity in her pride, of

the deep reverence in David's looks and words and manner towards her,

but it was the young printer's enthusiastic belief in Lucien that drew

her to him most of all. He had divined the way to win Eve. The mute

delights of this love of theirs differed from the transports of stormy

passion, as wildflowers in the fields from the brilliant flowers in

garden beds. Interchange of glances, delicate and sweet as blue water-

flowers on the surface of the stream; a look in either face, vanishing

as swiftly as the scent of briar-rose; melancholy, tender as the

velvet of moss--these were the blossoms of two rare natures, springing

up out of a rich and fruitful soil on foundations of rock. Many a time

Eve had seen revelations of the strength that lay below the appearance

of weakness, and made such full allowance for all that David left

undone, that the slightest word now might bring about a closer union

of soul and soul.

Eve opened the door, and Lucien sat down without a word at the little

table on an X-shaped trestle. There was no tablecloth; the poor little

household boasted but three silver spoons and forks, and Eve had laid

them all for the dearly loved brother.

"What have you there?" she asked, when she had set a dish on the

table, and put the extinguisher on the portable stove, where it had

been kept hot for him.