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 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