his first appearance in a Parisian salon,
especially when he is shrewd and intelligent and does not wear the
imperturbable self-assurance of the bumpkin like a coat of mail beneath
his linen buckler.

You, Parisians of Paris, who, ever since you were sixteen have
exhibited your youth at the receptions of all classes of society, in
your first black coat with your crush-hat on your hip,--you, I say,
have no conception of that anguish, compounded of vanity, timidity and
recollections of romantic books, which screws our teeth together,
embarrasses our movements, makes us for a whole evening a statue
between two doors, a fixture in a window-recess, a poor, pitiful,
wandering creature, incapable of making his existence manifest
otherwise than by changing his position from time to time, preferring
to die of thirst rather than go near the sideboard, and going away
without having said a word, unless we may have stammered one of those
incoherent absurdities which we remember for months, and which makes
us, when we think of it at night, utter an _ah!_ of frantic shame and
bury our face in the pillow.

Paul de Gery was a martyr of that type. In his province he had always
lived a very retired life, with a pious, melancholy old aunt, until the
time when, as a student of law, originally destined for a profession in
which his father had left an excellent reputation, he had been induced
to frequent the salons of some of the counsellors of the court,
old-fashioned, gloomy dwellings, with dingy hangings, where he made a
fourth hand at whist with venerable ghosts. Jenkins' evening party was
therefore a debut in society for that provincial, whose very ignorance
and Southern adaptability made him first of all a keen observer.

From the place where he stood he watched the interesting procession,
still in progress at midnight, of Jenkins' guests, the whole body of
the fashionable physician's patients; the very flower of society, a
large sprinkling of politics and finance, bankers, deputies, a few
artists, all the jaded ones of Parisian high life, pale and wan, with
gleaming eyes, saturated with arsenic like gluttonous mice, but
insatiably greedy of poison and of life. Through the open salon and the
great reception-room, the doors of which had been removed, he could see
the stairway and landing, profusely decorated with flowers along the
sides, where the long trains were duly spread, their silky weight
seeming to force back the decollete bu