y's. And now, behold Lucien frisking and skipping, light of foot
because light of heart, on his way to the Terrasse des Feuillants to
take a look at the people of quality on promenade there. Pretty women
walk arm-in-arm with men of fashion, their adorers, couples greet each
other with a glance as they pass; how different it is from the terrace
at Beaulieu! How far finer the birds on this perch than the Angouleme
species! It is as if you beheld all the colors that glow in the
plumage of the feathered tribes of India and America, instead of the
sober European families.

Those were two wretched hours that Lucien spent in the Garden of the
Tuileries. A violent revulsion swept through him, and he sat in
judgment upon himself.

In the first place, not a single one of these gilded youths wore a
swallow-tail coat. The few exceptions, one or two poor wretches, a
clerk here and there, an annuitant from the Marais, could be ruled out
on the score of age; and hard upon the discovery of a distinction
between morning and evening dress, the poet's quick sensibility and
keen eyes saw likewise that his shabby old clothes were not fit to be
seen; the defects in his coat branded that garment as ridiculous; the
cut was old-fashioned, the color was the wrong shade of blue, the
collar outrageously ungainly, the coat tails, by dint of long wear,
overlapped each other, the buttons were reddened, and there were fatal
white lines along the seams. Then his waistcoat was too short, and so
grotesquely provincial, that he hastily buttoned his coat over it;
and, finally, no man of any pretension to fashion wore nankeen
trousers. Well-dressed men wore charming fancy materials or immaculate
white, and every one had straps to his trousers, while the shrunken
hems of Lucien's nether garments manifested a violent antipathy for
the heels of boots which they wedded with obvious reluctance. Lucien
wore a white cravat with embroidered ends; his sister had seen that M.
du Hautoy and M. de Chandour wore such things, and hastened to make
similar ones for her brother. Here, no one appeared to wear white
cravats of a morning except a few grave seniors, elderly capitalists,
and austere public functionaries, until, in the street on the other
side of the railings, Lucien noticed a grocer's boy walking along the
Rue de Rivoli with a basket on his head; him the man of Angouleme
detected in the act of sporting a cravat, with both ends adorned by
the handiwork of some