g, you know. He
said--the sitting was a noisy one, the Left were threshing out some
infernal questions--he said, during the height of the uproar, and rapping
with his paper-knife on his desk: "But we can not hear!" And as these
words were received on all sides with universal approbation and cries of
"Hear, hear!" he gave his thoughts a more parliamentary expression by
adding: "The voice of the honorable gentleman who is speaking does not
reach us." It was not much certainly, and the amendment may have been
carried all the same, but after all it was a step; a triumph, to tell the
truth, since your husband has from day to day put off the delivery of his
maiden speech. Behold a happy deputy, a deputy who has just--put on his
first pair of breeches.

What matter whether the reason be a serious or a futile one, if your
blood flows faster, if you feel happier, if you are proud of yourself? To
win a great victory or put on a new bonnet, what matters it if this new
bonnet gives you the same joy as a laurel crown?

Therefore do not laugh too much at baby if his first pair of breeches
intoxicates him, if, when he wears them, he thinks his shadow longer and
the trees less high. He is beginning his career as a man, dear child,
nothing more.

How many things have not people been proud of since the beginning of the
world? They were proud of their noses under Francis the First, of their
perukes under Louis XIV, and later on of their appetites and stoutness. A
man is proud of his wife, his idleness, his wit, his stupidity, the beard
on his chin, the cravat round his neck, the hump on his back.

CHAPTER XXX

COUNTRY CHILDREN

I love the baby that runs about under the trees of the Tuileries; I love
the pretty little fair-haired girls with nice white stockings and
unmanageable crinolines. I like to watch the tiny damsels decked out like
reliquaries, and already affecting coquettish and lackadaisical ways. It
seems to me that in each of them I can see thousands of charming faults
already peeping forth. But all these miniature men and women, exchanging
postage stamps and chattering of dress, have something of the effect of
adorable monstrosities on me.

I like them as I like a bunch of grapes in February, or a dish of green
peas in December.

In the babies' kingdom, my friend, my favorite is the country baby,
running about in the dust on the highway barefoot and ragged, and
searching for black birds' and chaffinches' nests o