of a chair, and will always say the same
inevitable thing, the only thing that can be or should be said that day;
for example, "So the poor General is dead!" or "Have you heard the new
piece at the Francais? It is not very strong, but it is well played!"
"This will be delicious;" and Amedee will admire, above all things,
Madame this one's play of countenance, when Madame G------tells her that
Madame B-------'s daughter is to marry Madame C-----'s nephew. While she
hardly knows these people, she will manifest as lively a joy as if they
had announced the death of an old aunt, whose money she is waiting for to
renew the furniture in her house. And, on the contrary, when Madame
D---announces that Madame E-----'s little son has the whooping-cough, at
once, without transition, by a change of expression that would make the
fortune of an actress, the lady of the house puts on an air of
consternation, as if the cholera had broken out the night before in the
Halles quarter.

Amedee is launched, I repeat it. He is still a little green and will
become the dupe, for a long time, of all the shams, grimaces, acting, and
false smiles, which cover so many artificial teeth. At first sight all is
elegance, harmony, and delicacy. Since Amedee does not know that the
Princess Krazinska's celebrated head of hair was cut from the heads of
the Breton girls, how could he suspect that the austere defender of the
clergy, M. Lemarguillier, had been gravely compromised in a love affair,
and had thrown himself at the feet of the chief of police, exclaiming,
"Do not ruin me!" When the king of society is announced, the young Duc de
la Tour-Prends-Garde, whose one ancestor was at the battle of the bridge,
and who is just now introducing a new style in trousers, Amedee could not
suspect that the favorite amusement of this fashionable rake consisted in
drinking in the morning upon an empty stomach, with his coachman, at a
grog-shop on the corner. When the pretty Baroness des Nenuphars blushed
up to her ears because someone spoke the word "tea-spoon" before her, and
she considered it to be an unwarrantable indelicacy--nobody knows why--it
is assuredly not our young friend who will suspect that, in order to pay
the gambling debts of her third lover, this modest person had just sold
secretly her family jewels.

Rest assured Amedee will lose all these illusions in time. The day will
come when he will not take in earnest this grand comedy in white cravats.
He