ome of the women, flattered by M. du Chatelet, discerned in him
the superior qualities lacking in the men of their own sect, and the
insurrection of self-love was pacified. These ladies all hoped to
succeed to the Imperial Highness. Purists were of the opinion that you
might see the intruder in Mme. de Bargeton's house, but not elsewhere.
Du Chatelet was fain to put up with a good deal of insolence, but he
held his ground by cultivating the clergy. He encouraged the queen of
Angouleme in foibles bred of the soil; he brought her all the newest
books; he read aloud the poetry that appeared. Together they went into
ecstasies over these poets; she in all sincerity, he with suppressed
yawns; but he bore with the Romantics with a patience hardly to be
expected of a man of the Imperial school, who scarcely could make
out what the young writers meant. Not so Mme. de Bargeton; she waxed
enthusiastic over the renaissance, due to the return of the Bourbon
Lilies; she loved M. de Chateaubriand for calling Victor Hugo "a sublime
child." It depressed her that she could only know genius from afar, she
sighed for Paris, where great men live. For these reasons M. du Chatelet
thought he had done a wonderfully clever thing when he told the lady
that at that moment in Angouleme there was "another sublime child,"
a young poet, a rising star whose glory surpassed the whole Parisian
galaxy, though he knew it not. A great man of the future had been born
in L'Houmeau! The headmaster of the school had shown the Baron some
admirable verses. The poor and humble lad was a second Chatterton, with
none of the political baseness and ferocious hatred of the great ones of
earth that led his English prototype to turn pamphleteer and revile
his benefactors. Mme. de Bargeton in her little circle of five or six
persons, who were supposed to share her tastes for art and letters,
because this one scraped a fiddle, and that splashed sheets of white
paper, more or less, with sepia, and the other was president of a local
agricultural society, or was gifted with a bass voice that rendered _Se
fiato in corpo_ like a war whoop--Mme. de Bargeton amid these grotesque
figures was like a famished actor set down to a stage dinner of
pasteboard. No words, therefore, can describe her joy at these tidings.
She must see this poet, this angel! She raved about him, went into
raptures, talked of him for whole hours together. Before two days
were out the sometime diplomatic couri