ought him to town; he had hopes of an appointment as
secretary-general to a government department, and meant to take a seat
in the Council of State as Master of Requests. He had come to Paris to
ask for fulfilment of the promises that had been given him, for a man
of his stamp could not be expected to remain a comptroller all his
life; he would rather be nothing at all, and offer himself for
election as deputy, or re-enter diplomacy. Chatelet grew visibly
taller; Lucien dimly began to recognize in this elderly beau the
superiority of the man of the world who knows Paris; and, most of all,
he felt ashamed to owe his evening's amusement to his rival. And while
the poet looked ill at ease and awkward Her Royal Highness'
ex-secretary was quite in his element. He smiled at his rival's
hesitations, at his astonishment, at the questions he put, at the
little mistakes which the latter ignorantly made, much as an old salt
laughs at an apprentice who has not found his sea legs; but Lucien's
pleasure at seeing a play for the first time in Paris outweighed the
annoyance of these small humiliations.

That evening marked an epoch in Lucien's career; he put away a good
many of his ideas as to provincial life in the course of it. His
horizon widened; society assumed different proportions. There were
fair Parisiennes in fresh and elegant toilettes all about him; Mme. de
Bargeton's costume, tolerably ambitious though it was, looked dowdy by
comparison; the material, like the fashion and the color, was out of
date. That way of arranging her hair, so bewitching in Angouleme,
looked frightfully ugly here among the daintily devised coiffures
which he saw in every direction.

"Will she always look like that?" said he to himself, ignorant that
the morning had been spent in preparing a transformation.

In the provinces comparison and choice are out of the question; when a
face has grown familiar it comes to possess a certain beauty that is
taken for granted. But transport the pretty woman of the provinces to
Paris, and no one takes the slightest notice of her; her prettiness is
of the comparative degree illustrated by the saying that among the
blind the one-eyed are kings. Lucien's eyes were now busy comparing
Mme. de Bargeton with other women, just as she herself had contrasted
him with Chatelet on the previous day. And Mme. de Bargeton, on her
part, permitted herself some strange reflections upon her lover. The
poet cut a poor figure notwi