the carriage with Arthur Papillon, who gave him a slap on
the thigh, exclaiming, joyfully:

"Well, you are launched!"

It was true; he was launched, and he will wear out more than one suit of
evening clothes before he learns all that this action "going into
society," which seems nothing at all at first, and which really is
nothing, implies, to an industrious man and artist, of useless activity
and lost time. He is launched! He has made a successful debut! A dinner
in the city! At Madame Fontaine's dinner on the next Tuesday, some
abominable wine and aged salmon was served to Amedee by a butler named
Adolphe, who ought rather to have been called Exili or Castaing, and who,
after fifteen years' service to the Countess, already owned two good
paying houses in Paris. At the time, however, all went well, for Amedee
had a good healthy stomach and could digest buttons from a uniform; but
when all the Borgias, in black-silk stockings and white-silk gloves, who
wish to become house-owners, have cooked their favorite dishes for him,
and have practised only half a dozen winters, two or three times a week
upon him, we shall know more as to his digestion. Still that dinner was
enjoyable. Beginning with the suspicious salmon, the statesman with the
brush-broom head, the one who had overthrown Louis-Philippe without
suspecting it, started to explain how, if they had listened to his
advice, this constitutional king's dynasty would yet be upon the throne;
and at the moment when the wretched butler poured out his most poisonous
wine, the old lady who looked like a dromedary with rings in its ears,
made Amedee--her unfortunate neighbor--undergo a new oral examination
upon the poets of the nineteenth century, and asked him what he thought
of Lamartine's clamorous debts, and Victor Hugo's foolish pride, and
Alfred de Musset's intemperate habits.

The worthy Amedee is launched! He will go and pay visits of indigestion;
appear one day at Madame such a one's, and at the houses of several other
"Madames." At first he will stay there a half-hour, the simpleton! until
he sees that the cunning ones only come in and go out exactly as one does
in a booth at a fair. He will see pass before him--but this time in
corsages of velvet or satin-all the necks and shoulders of his
acquaintances, those that he turned away from with disgust and those that
made him blush. Each Madame this one, entering Madame that one's house,
will seat herself upon the edge