harlotte
who nursed my sister-in-law through her confinement two months ago."

"What is there extraordinary in that, my dear?" asked Mme. de Bargeton
with her most regal air. "She is a druggist's widow, is she not? A
poor fate for a Rubempre. Suppose that you and I had not a penny in
the world, what should either of us do for a living? How would you
support your children?"

Mme. de Bargeton's presence of mind put an end to the jeremiads of the
_noblesse_. Great natures are prone to make a virtue of misfortune; and
there is something irresistibly attractive about well-doing when
persisted in through evil report; innocence has the piquancy of the
forbidden.

Mme. de Bargeton's rooms were crowded that evening with friends who
came to remonstrate with her. She brought her most caustic wit into
play. She said that as noble families could not produce a Moliere, a
Racine, a Rousseau, a Voltaire, a Massillon, a Beaumarchais, or a
Diderot, people must make up their minds to it, and accept the fact
that great men had upholsterers and clockmakers and cutlers for their
fathers. She said that genius was always noble. She railed at boorish
squires for understanding their real interests so imperfectly. In
short, she talked a good deal of nonsense, which would have let the
light into heads less dense, but left her audience agape at her
eccentricity. And in these ways she conjured away the storm with her
heavy artillery.

When Lucien, obedient to her request, appeared for the first time in
the faded great drawing-room, where the whist-tables were set out, she
welcomed him graciously, and brought him forward, like a queen who
means to be obeyed. She addressed the controller of excise as "M.
Chatelet," and left that gentleman thunderstruck by the discovery that
she knew about the illegal superfetation of the particle. Lucien was
forced upon her circle, and was received as a poisonous element, which
every person in it vowed to expel with the antidote of insolence.

Nais had won a victory, but she had lost her supremacy of empire.
There was a rumor of insurrection. Amelie, otherwise Mme. de Chandour,
harkening to "M. Chatelet's" counsels, determined to erect a rival
altar by receiving on Wednesdays. Now Mme. de Bargeton's salon was
open every evening; and those who frequented it were so wedded to
their ways, so accustomed to meet about the same tables, to play the
familiar game of backgammon, to see the same faces and the same candle