most elegant of ladies a corpulent justice of
the peace who believes he is making himself agreeable when he urges his
fair neighbor to frequent potations.

Madame de Bergenheim had discovered symptoms of haughty jealousy among
her country neighbors, always ready to feel themselves insulted and
very little qualified to make themselves agreeable in society. So she
resolved to extend a general invitation to all those whom she felt
obliged to receive, in order to relieve herself at once of a nuisance
for which no pleasure could prove an equivalent. This day was one of her
duty days.

Among these ladies, much more gorgeously than elegantly attired, these
healthy young girls with large arms, and feet shaped like flat-irons,
ponderous gentlemen strangled by their white cravats and puffed up in
their frock-coats, Gerfaut, whose nervous system had been singularly
irritated by his disappointment of the night before, felt ready to burst
with rage. He was seated at the table between two ladies, who seemed to
have exhausted, in their toilettes, every color in the solar spectrum,
and whose coquettish instincts were aroused by the proximity of a
celebrated writer. But their simperings were all lost; the one for whom
they were intended bore himself in a sulky way, which fortunately passed
for romantic melancholy; this rendered him still more interesting in the
eyes of his neighbor on the left, a plump blonde about twenty-five years
old, fresh and dimpled, who doted upon Lord Byron, a common pretension
among pretty, buxom women who adore false sentimentality.

With the exception of a bow when he entered the drawing-room, Octave
had not shown Madame de Bergenheim any attention. The cold, disdainful,
bored manner in which he patiently endured the pleasures of the day
exceeded even the privilege for boorish bearing willingly granted to
gentlemen of unquestionable talent. Clemence, on the contrary, seemed to
increase in amiability and liveliness. There was not one of her tiresome
guests to whom she did not address some pleasant remark, not one
of those vulgar, pretentious women to whom she was not gracious and
attentive; one would have said that she had a particular desire to
be more attractive than usual, and that her lover's sombre air added
materially to her good humor.

After dinner they retired to the drawing-room where coffee was served. A
sudden shower, whose drops pattered loudly against the windows, rendered
impossible all pla