acquaintance is not cordial."

"I did not mean at M. Louvier's dinner, but at the Duchesse de
Tarascon's ball. You, as one of her special favourites, will doubtless
honour her reunion."

"Yes; I have promised my daughter to go to the ball. But the Duchesse is
Imperialist. M. de Mauleon seems to be either a Legitimist, according to
Monsieur le Marquis, or an Orleanist, according to our friend De Breze."

"What of that? Can there be a more loyal Bourbonite than De
Rochebriant?--and he goes to the ball. It is given out of the season,
in celebration of a family marriage. And the Duchesse de Tarascon
is connected with Alain, and therefore with De Mauleon, though but
distantly."

"Ah! excuse my ignorance of genealogy."

"As if the genealogy of noble names were not the history of France,"
muttered Alain, indignantly.

CHAPTER II.

Yes, the "Sens Commun" was a success: it had made a sensation at
starting; the sensation was on the increase. It is difficult for an
Englishman to comprehend the full influence of a successful journal at
Paris; the station--political, literary, social--which it confers on
the contributors who effect the success. M. Lebeau had shown much more
sagacity in selecting Gustave Rameau for the nominal editor than Savarin
supposed or my reader might detect. In the first place, Gustave himself,
with all his defects of information and solidity of intellect, was not
without real genius,--and a sort of genius that when kept in restraint,
and its field confined to sentiment or sarcasm, was in unison with the
temper of the day; in the second place, it was only through Gustave that
Lebeau could have got at Savarin, and the names which that brilliant
writer had secured at the outset would have sufficed to draw attention
to the earliest numbers of the "Sens Commun," despite a title which
did not seem alluring. But these names alone could not have sufficed to
circulate the new journal to the extent it had already reached. This was
due to the curiosity excited by leading articles of a style new to the
Parisian public, and of which the authorship defied conjecture. They
were signed Pierre Firmin,--supposed to be a nom de plume, as, that name
was utterly unknown in the world of letters. They affected the tone of
an impartial observer; they neither espoused nor attacked any particular
party; they laid down no abstract doctrines of government. But somehow
or other, in language terse yet familiar, sometimes ca