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