and hear the anticipatory
criticisms made in the blunt, provincial fashion that too often
borders on rudeness. He had not expected this prolonged ordeal of
pin-pricks; it put him still more out of humor with himself. He grew
impatient to begin the reading, for then he could assume an attitude
which should put an end to his mental torments; but Jacques was giving
Mme. de Pimentel the history of his last day's sport; Adrien was
holding forth to Mlle. Laure de Rastignac on Rossini, the newly-risen
music star, and Astolphe, who had got by heart a newspaper paragraph
on a patent plow, was giving the Baron the benefit of the description.
Lucien, luckless poet that he was, did not know that there was scarce
a soul in the room besides Mme. de Bargeton who could understand
poetry. The whole matter-of-fact assembly was there by a
misapprehension, nor did they, for the most part, know what they had
come out for to see. There are some words that draw a public as
unfailingly as the clash of cymbals, the trumpet, or the mountebank's
big drum; "beauty," "glory," "poetry," are words that bewitch the
coarsest intellect.

When every one had arrived; when the buzz of talk ceased after
repeated efforts on the part of M. de Bargeton, who, obedient to his
wife, went round the room much as the beadle makes the circle of the
church, tapping the pavement with his wand; when silence, in fact, was
at last secured, Lucien went to the round table near Mme. de Bargeton.
A fierce thrill of excitement ran through him as he did so. He
announced in an uncertain voice that, to prevent disappointment, he
was about to read the masterpieces of a great poet, discovered only
recently (for although Andre de Chenier's poems appeared in 1819, no
one in Angouleme had so much as heard of him). Everybody interpreted
this announcement in one way--it was a shift of Mme. de Bargeton's,
meant to save the poet's self-love and to put the audience at ease.

Lucien began with _Le Malade_, and the poem was received with a murmur
of applause; but he followed it with _L'Aveugle_, which proved too great
a strain upon the average intellect. None but artists or those endowed
with the artistic temperament can understand and sympathize with him
in the diabolical torture of that reading. If poetry is to be rendered
by the voice, and if the listener is to grasp all that it means, the
most devout attention is essential; there should be an intimate
alliance between the reader and hi