will not have the bad taste to show his indignation. No! he will pity
these unfortunate society people condemned to hypocrisy and falsehood. He
will even excuse their whims and vices as he thinks of the frightful
ennui that overwhelms them. Yes, he will understand how the unhappy Duc
de la Tour-Prends-Garde, who is condemned to hear La Favorita seventeen
times during the winter, may feel at times the need of a violent
distraction, and go to drink white wine with his servant. Amedee will be
full of indulgence, only one must pardon him for his plebeian heart and
native uncouthness; for at the moment when he shall have fathomed the
emptiness and vanity of this worldly farce, he will keep all of his
sympathy for those who retain something like nature. He will esteem
infinitely more the poorest of the workmen--a wood-sawyer or a
bell-hanger--than a politician haranguing from the mantel, or an old
literary dame who sparkles like a window in the Palais-Royal, and is
tattooed like a Caribbean; he will prefer an old; wrinkled, village
grand-dame in her white cap, who still hoes, although sixty years old,
her little field of potatoes.

CHAPTER XIII

A SERPENT AT THE FIRESIDE

A little more than a year has passed. It is now the first days of
October; and when the morning mist is dissipated, the sky is of so limpid
a blue and the air so pure and fresh, that Amedee Violette is almost
tempted to make a paper kite and fly it over the fortifications, as he
did in his youth. But the age for that has passed; Amedee's real kite is
more fragile than if it had been made of sticks and pieces of old paper
pasted on one over another; it does not ascend very high yet, and the
thread that sails it is not very strong. Amedee's kite is his growing
reputation. He must work to sustain it; and always with the secret hope
of making little Maria his wife. Amedee works. He is not so poor now,
since he earns at the ministry two hundred francs a month, and from time
to time publishes a prose story in journals where his copy is paid for.
He has also left his garret in the Faubourg St.-Jacques and lives on the
Ile St. Louis, in one room only, but large and bright, from whose window
he can see, as he leans out, the coming and going of boats on the river
and the sun as it sets behind Notre-Dame.

Amedee has been working mostly upon his drama, for the Comedie-Francaise
this summer, and it is nearly done; it is a modern drama in verse,
entitled L'Ate