the soft stone of the country, mellowed by time. It looked dismal

enough from the street, and inside it was extremely" target="_blank" title="ad.极端地；非常地">extremely plain; there was
the usual provincial courtyard--chilly, prim, and neat; and the house

itself was sober, almost convent-like, but in good repair.
Lucien went up the old staircase with the balustrade of chestnut wood

(the stone steps ceased after the second floor), crossed a shabby
antechamber, and came into the presence in a little wainscoted

drawing-room, beyond a dimly-lit salon. The carved woodwork, in the
taste of the eighteenth century, had been painted gray. There were

monochrome paintings on the frieze panels, and the walls were adorned
with crimsondamask with a meagre border. The old-fashioned furniture

shrank piteously from sight under covers of a red-and-white check
pattern. On the sofa, covered with thin mattressed cushions, sat Mme.

de Bargeton; the poet beheld her by the light of two wax candles on a
sconce with a screen fitted to it, that stood before her on a round

table with a green cloth.
The queen did not attempt to rise, but she twisted very gracefully on

her seat, smiling on the poet, who was not a little fluttered by the
serpentine quiverings; her manner was distinguished, he thought. For

Mme. de Bargeton, she was impressed with Lucien's extreme beauty, with
his diffidence, with everything about him; for her the poet already

was poetry incarnate. Lucien scrutinized his hostess with discreet
side glances; she disappointed none of his expectations of a great

lady.
Mme. de Bargeton, following a new fashion, wore a coif of slashed

black velvet, a head-dress that recalls memories of mediaeval legend
to a young imagination, to amplify, as it were, the dignity of

womanhood. Her red-gold hair, escaping from under her cap, hung loose;
bright golden color in the light, red in the rounded shadow of the

curls that only partially hid her neck. Beneath a massive white brow,
clean cut and strongly outlined, shone a pair of bright gray eyes

encircled by a margin of mother-of-pearl, two blue veins on each side
of the nose bringing out the whiteness of that delicatesetting. The

Bourbon curve of the nose added to the ardent expression of an oval
face; it was as if the royal temper of the House of Conde shone

conspicuous in this feature. The careless cross-folds of the bodice
left a white throat bare, and half revealed the outlines of a still

youthful figure and shapely, well placed contours beneath.
With fingers tapering and well-kept, though somewhat too thin, Mme. de

Bargeton amiably pointed to a seat by her side, M. du Chatelet
ensconced himself in an easy-chair, and Lucien then became aware that

there was no one else in the room.
Mme. de Bargeton's words intoxicated the young poet from L'Houmeau.

For Lucien those three hours spent in her presence went by like a
dream that we would fain have last forever. She was not thin, he

thought; she was slender; in love with love, and loverless; and
delicate in spite of her strength. Her foibles, exaggerated by her

manner, took his fancy; for youth sets out with a love of hyperbole,
that infirmity of noble souls. He did not so much as see that her

cheeks were faded, that the patches of color on the cheek-bone were
faded and hardened to a brick-red by listless days and a certain

amount of ailing health. His imagination fastened at once on the
glowing eyes, on the dainty curls rippling with light, on the dazzling

fairness of her skin, and hovered about those bright points as the
moth hovers about the candle flame. For her spirit made such appeal to

his that he could no longer see the woman as she was. Her feminine
exaltation had carried him away, the energy of her expressions, a

little staled in truth by pretty hard and constant wear, but new to
Lucien, fascinated him so much the more easily because he was

determined to be pleased. He had brought none of his own verses to
read, but nothing was said of them; he had purposely left them behind

because he meant to return; and Mme. de Bargeton did not ask for them,
because she meant that he should come back some future day to read

them to her. Was not this a beginning of an understanding?
As for M. Sixte du Chatelet, he was not over well pleased with all

this. He perceived rather too late in the day that he had a rival in
this handsome young fellow. He went with him as far as the first

flight of steps below Beaulieu to try the effect of a little
diplomacy; and Lucien was not a little astonished when he heard the

controller of excise pluming himself on having effected the
introduction, and proceeding in this character to give him (Lucien)

the benefit of his advice.
"Heaven send that Lucien might meet with better treatment than he had

done," such was the matter of M. du Chatelet's discourse. "The Court
was less insolent that this pack of dolts in Angouleme. You were

expected to enduredeadly insults; the superciliousness you had to put
up with was something abominable. If this kind of folk did not alter

their behavior, there would be another Revolution of '89. As for
himself, if he continued to go to the house, it was because he had

found Mme. de Bargeton to his taste; she was the only woman worth
troubling about in Angouleme; he had been paying court to her for want

of anything better to do, and now he was desperately in love with her.
She would be his before very long, she loved him, everything pointed

that way. The conquest of this haughty queen of the society would be
his one revenge on the whole houseful of booby clodpates."

Chatelet talked of his passion in the tone of a man who would have a
rival's life if he crossed his path. The elderlybutterfly of the

Empire came down with his whole weight on the poor poet, and tried to
frighten and crush him by his self-importance. He grew taller as he

gave an embellished account of his perilous wanderings; but while he
impressed the poet's imagination, the lover was by no means afraid of

him.
In spite of the elderly coxcomb, and regardless of his threats and

airs of a bourgeois bravo, Lucien went back again and again to the
house--not too often at first, as became a man of L'Houmeau; but

before very long he grew accustomed to the vast condescension, as it
had seemed to him at the outset, and came more and more frequently.

The druggist's son was a completely insignificant being. If any of the
noblesse, men or women, calling upon Nais, found Lucien in the room,

they met him with the overwhelming graciousness that well-bred people
use towards their inferiors. Lucien thought them very kind for a time,

and later found out the real reason for their specious amiability. It
was not long before he detected a patronizing tone that stirred his

gall and confirmed him in his bitter Republicanism, a phase of opinion
through which many a would-be patrician passes by way of prelude to

his introduction to polite society.
But was there anything that he would not have endured for Nais?--for

so he heard her named by the clan. Like Spanish grandees and the old
Austrian nobility at Vienna, these folk, men and women alike, called

each other by their Christian names, a final shade of distinction in
the inmost ring of Angoumoisin aristocracy.

Lucien loved Nais as a young man loves the first woman who flatters
him, for Nais prophesied great things and boundless fame for Lucien.

She used all her skill to secure her hold upon her poet; not merely
did she exalt him beyond measure, but she represented him to himself

as a child without fortune whom she meant to start in life; she
treated him like a child, to keep him near her; she made him her

reader, her secretary, and cared more for him than she would have
thought possible after the dreadfulcalamity that had befallen her.

She was very cruel to herself in those days, telling herself that it
would be folly to love a young man of twenty, so far apart from her

socially in the first place; and her behavior to him was a bewildering
mixture of familiarity and capricious fits of pride arising from her

fears and scruples. She was sometimes a lofty patroness, sometimes she
was tender and flattered him. At first, while he was overawed by her

rank, Lucien experienced the extremes of dread, hope, and despair, the
torture of a first love, that is beaten deep into the heart with the

hammer strokes of alternate bliss and anguish. For two months Mme. de
Bargeton was for him a benefactress who would take a mother's interest

in him; but confidences came next. Mme. de Bargeton began to address
her poet as "dear Lucien," and then as "dear," without more ado. The

poet grew bolder, and addressed the great lady as Nais, and there
followed a flash of anger that captivates a boy; she reproached him

for calling her by a name in everybody's mouth. The haughty and high-
born Negrepelisse offered the fair angel youth that one of her

appellations which was unsoiled by use; for him she would be "Louise."
Lucien was in the third heaven.