serting itself; he is some ones boy."

The father, on the contrary, is delighted. He laughs in his moustache to
see the little arching calves peeping out beneath the trousers; he feels
the little body, the outline of which can be clearly made out under
the new garment, and says to himself; "How well he is put together, the
rascal. He will have broad shoulders and strong loins like myself. How
firmly his little feet tread the ground." Papa would like to see him in
jackboots; for a trifle he would buy him spurs. He begins to see himself
in this little one sprung from him; he looks at him in a fresh light,
and, for the first time, he finds a great charm in calling him "my boy."

As to the baby, he is intoxicated, proud, triumphant, although somewhat
embarrassed as to his arms and legs, and, be it said, without any wish
to offend him, greatly resembling those little poodles we see freshly
shaven on the approach of summer. What greatly disturbed the poor little
fellow is past. How many men of position are there who do not experience
similar inconvenience. He knows very well that breeches, like nobility,
render certain things incumbent on their possessor, that he must now
assume new ways, new gestures, a new tone of voice; he begins to scan
out of the corner of his eye the movements of his papa, who is by no
means ill pleased at this: he clumsily essays a masculine gesture or
two; and this struggle between his past and his present gives him for
some time the most comical air in the world. His petticoats haunt him,
and really he is angry that it is so.

Dear first pair of breeches! I love you, because you are a faithful
friend, and I encounter at every step in life you and your train of
sweet sensations. Are you not the living image of the latest illusion
caressed by our vanity? You, young officer, who still measure your
moustaches in the glass, and who have just assumed for the first
time the epaulette and the gold belt, how did you feel when you went
downstairs and heard the scabbard of your sabre go clink-clank on the
steps, when with your cap on one side and your arm akimbo you found
yourself in the street, and, an irresistible impulse urging you on, you
gazed at your figure reflected in the chemist's bottles? Will you
dare to say that you did not halt before those bottles? First pair of
breeches, lieutenant.

You will find them again, these breeches, when you are promoted to be
Captain and are decorated. And later on,