u to be the friend of both these
gentlemen. Nothing is more dreary, more sulky, than a dinner where all
the guests are strangers, so it was for their sake that I hailed you
in--but you will come another time for mine, I hope?--Say that you
will."

And for a few minutes she moved about the room with Stidmann, wholly
occupied with him.

Crevel and Hulot were announced separately, and then a deputy named
Beauvisage.

This individual, a provincial Crevel, one of the men created to make
up the crowd in the world, voted under the banner of Giraud, a State
Councillor, and Victorin Hulot. These two politicians were trying to
form a nucleus of progressives in the loose array of the Conservative
Party. Giraud himself occasionally spent the evening at Madame
Marneffe's, and she flattered herself that she should also capture
Victorin Hulot; but the puritanical lawyer had hitherto found excuses
for refusing to accompany his father and father-in-law. It seemed to
him criminal to be seen in the house of the woman who cost his mother so
many tears. Victorin Hulot was to the puritans of political life what a
pious woman is among bigots.

Beauvisage, formerly a stocking manufacturer at Arcis, was anxious to
_pick up the Paris style_. This man, one of the outer stones of the
Chamber, was forming himself under the auspices of this delicious and
fascinating Madame Marneffe. Introduced here by Crevel, he had accepted
him, at her instigation, as his model and master. He consulted him on
every point, took the address of his tailor, imitated him, and tried to
strike the same attitudes. In short, Crevel was his Great Man.

Valerie, surrounded by these bigwigs and the three artists, and
supported by Lisbeth, struck Wenceslas as a really superior woman, all
the more so because Claude Vignon spoke of her like a man in love.

"She is Madame de Maintenon in Ninon's petticoats!" said the veteran
critic. "You may please her in an evening if you have the wit; but
as for making her love you--that would be a triumph to crown a man's
ambition and fill up his life."

Valerie, while seeming cold and heedless of her former neighbor, piqued
his vanity, quite unconsciously indeed, for she knew nothing of the
Polish character. There is in the Slav a childish element, as there
is in all these primitively wild nations which have overflowed into
civilization rather than that they have become civilized. The race has
spread like an inundation, and has covere