A Distinguished Provincial at Paris | Page 8

Chatelet again, and cursed the
chance that had brought the Baron to Paris. The Baron said that
ambition had brought him to town; he had hopes of an appointment as
secretary-general to a government department, and meant to take a seat
in the Council of State as Master of Requests. He had come to Paris to
ask for fulfilment of the promises that had been given him, for a man of
his stamp could not be expected to remain a comptroller all his life; he
would rather be nothing at all, and offer himself for election as deputy,
or re-enter diplomacy. Chatelet grew visibly taller; Lucien dimly began
to recognize in this elderly beau the superiority of the man of the world
who knows Paris; and, most of all, he felt ashamed to owe his evening's
amusement to his rival. And while the poet looked ill at ease and
awkward Her Royal Highness' ex-secretary was quite in his element.
He smiled at his rival's hesitations, at his astonishment, at the questions
he put, at the little mistakes which the latter ignorantly made, much as
an old salt laughs at an apprentice who has not found his sea legs; but
Lucien's pleasure at seeing a play for the first time in Paris outweighed
the annoyance of these small humiliations.
That evening marked an epoch in Lucien's career; he put away a good
many of his ideas as to provincial life in the course of it. His horizon
widened; society assumed different proportions. There were fair
Parisiennes in fresh and elegant toilettes all about him; Mme. de
Bargeton's costume, tolerably ambitious though it was, looked dowdy
by comparison; the material, like the fashion and the color, was out of
date. That way of arranging her hair, so bewitching in Angouleme,
looked frightfully ugly here among the daintily devised coiffures which
he saw in every direction.
"Will she always look like that?" said he to himself, ignorant that the
morning had been spent in preparing a transformation.
In the provinces comparison and choice are out of the question; when a
face has grown familiar it comes to possess a certain beauty that is
taken for granted. But transport the pretty woman of the provinces to

Paris, and no one takes the slightest notice of her; her prettiness is of
the comparative degree illustrated by the saying that among the blind
the one-eyed are kings. Lucien's eyes were now busy comparing Mme.
de Bargeton with other women, just as she herself had contrasted him
with Chatelet on the previous day. And Mme. de Bargeton, on her part,
permitted herself some strange reflections upon her lover. The poet cut
a poor figure notwithstanding his singular beauty. The sleeves of his
jacket were too short; with his ill-cut country gloves and a waistcoat
too scanty for him, he looked prodigiously ridiculous, compared with
the young men in the balcony--"positively pitiable," thought Mme. de
Bargeton. Chatelet, interested in her without presumption, taking care
of her in a manner that revealed a profound passion; Chatelet, elegant,
and as much at home as an actor treading the familiar boards of his
theatre, in two days had recovered all the ground lost in the past six
months.
Ordinary people will not admit that our sentiments towards each other
can totally change in a moment, and yet certain it is, that two lovers not
seldom fly apart even more quickly than they drew together. In Mme.
de Bargeton and in Lucien a process of disenchantment was at work;
Paris was the cause. Life had widened out before the poet's eyes, as
society came to wear a new aspect for Louise. Nothing but an accident
now was needed to sever finally the bond that united them; nor was that
blow, so terrible for Lucien, very long delayed.
Mme. de Bargeton set Lucien down at his inn, and drove home with
Chatelet, to the intense vexation of the luckless lover.
"What will they say about me?" he wondered, as he climbed the stairs
to his dismal room.
"That poor fellow is uncommonly dull," said Chatelet, with a smile,
when the door was closed.
"That is the way with those who have a world of thoughts in their heart
and brain. Men who have so much in them to give out in great works
long dreamed of, profess a certain contempt for conversation, a
commerce in which the intellect spends itself in small change,"

returned the haughty Negrepelisse. She still had courage to defend
Lucien, but less for Lucien's sake than for her own.
"I grant it you willingly," replied the Baron, "but we live with human
beings and not with books. There, dear Nais! I see how it is, there is
nothing between you yet, and I am delighted that it is so. If you