who nursed my sister-in-law through her confinement two months ago."
"What is there extraordinary in that, my dear?" asked Mme. de Bargeton

with her most regal air. "She is a druggist's widow, is she not? A
poor fate for a Rubempre. Suppose that you and I had not a penny in

the world, what should either of us do for a living? How would you
support your children?"

Mme. de Bargeton's presence of mind put an end to the jeremiads of the
noblesse. Great natures are prone to make a virtue of misfortune; and

there is something irresistibly attractive about well-doing when
persisted in through evil report; innocence has the piquancy of the

forbidden.
Mme. de Bargeton's rooms were crowded that evening with friends who

came to remonstrate with her. She brought her most caustic wit into
play. She said that as noble families could not produce a Moliere, a

Racine, a Rousseau, a Voltaire, a Massillon, a Beaumarchais, or a
Diderot, people must make up their minds to it, and accept the fact

that great men had upholsterers and clockmakers and cutlers for their
fathers. She said that genius was always noble. She railed at boorish

squires for understanding their real interests so imperfectly. In
short, she talked a good deal of nonsense, which would have let the

light into heads less dense, but left her audience agape at her
eccentricity. And in these ways she conjured away the storm with her

heavy artillery.
When Lucien, obedient to her request, appeared for the first time in

the faded great drawing-room, where the whist-tables were set out, she
welcomed him graciously, and brought him forward, like a queen who

means to be obeyed. She addressed the controller of excise as "M.
Chatelet," and left that gentleman thunderstruck by the discovery that

she knew about the illegal superfetation of the particle. Lucien was
forced upon her circle, and was received as a poisonous element, which

every person in it vowed to expel with the antidote of insolence.
Nais had won a victory, but she had lost her supremacy of empire.

There was a rumor of insurrection. Amelie, otherwise Mme. de Chandour,
harkening to "M. Chatelet's" counsels, determined to erect a rival

altar by receiving on Wednesdays. Now Mme. de Bargeton's salon was
open every evening; and those who frequented it were so wedded to

their ways, so accustomed to meet about the same tables, to play the
familiar game of backgammon, to see the same faces and the same candle

sconces night after night; and afterwards to cloak and shawl, and put
on overshoes and hats in the old corridor, that they were quite as

much attached to the steps of the staircase as to the mistress of the
house.

"All resigned themselves to endure the songster" (chardonneret) "of
the sacred grove," said Alexandre de Brebian, which was witticism

number two. Finally, the president of the agricultural society put an
end to the sedition by remarking judicially that "before the

Revolution the greatest nobles admitted men like Dulcos and Grimm and
Crebillon to their society--men who were nobodies, like this little

poet of L'Houmeau; but one thing they never did, they never received
tax-collectors, and, after all, Chatelet is only a tax-collector."

Du Chatelet suffered for Chardon. Every one turned the cold shoulder
upon him; and Chatelet was conscious that he was attacked. When Mme.

de Bargeton called him "M. Chatelet," he swore to himself that he
would possess her; and now he entered into the views of the mistress

of the house, came to the support of the young poet, and declared
himself Lucien's friend. The great diplomatist, overlooked by the

shortsighted Emperor, made much of Lucien, and declared himself his
friend! To launch the poet into society, he gave a dinner, and asked

all the authorities to meet him--the prefect, the receiver-general,
the colonel in command of the garrison, the head of the Naval School,

the president of the Court, and so forth. The poet, poor fellow, was
feted so magnificently, and so belauded, that anybody but a young man

of two-and-twenty would have shrewdly suspected a hoax. After dinner,
Chatelet drew his rival on to recite The Dying Sardanapalus, the

masterpiece of the hour; and the headmaster of the school, a man of a
phlegmatic temperament, applauded with both hands, and vowed that

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau had done nothing finer. Sixte, Baron du
Chatelet, thought in his heart that this slip of a rhymster would

wither incontinently in a hothouse of adulation; perhaps he hoped that
when the poet's head was turned with brilliant dreams, he would

indulge in some impertinence that would promptlyconsign him to the
obscurity from which he had emerged. Pending the decease of genius,

Chatelet appeared to offer up his hopes as a sacrifice at Mme. de
Bargeton's feet; but with the ingenuity of a rake, he kept his own

plan in abeyance, watching the lovers' movements with keenly critical
eyes, and waiting for the opportunity of ruining Lucien.

From this time forward, vague rumors reported the existence of a great
man in Angoumois. Mme. de Bargeton was praised on all sides for the

interest which she took in this young eagle. No sooner was her conduct
approved than she tried to win a general sanction. She announced a

soiree, with ices, tea, and cakes, a great innovation in a city where
tea, as yet, was sold only by druggists as a remedy for indigestion.

The flower of Angoumoisin aristocracy was summoned to hear Lucien read
his great work. Louise had hidden all the difficulties from her

friend, but she let fall a few words touching the social cabal formed
against him; she would not have him ignorant of the perils besetting

his career as a man of genius, nor of the obstacles insurmountable to
weaklings. She drew a lesson from the recent victory. Her white hands

pointed him to glory that lay beyond a prolonged martyrdom; she spoke
of stakes and flaming pyres; she spread the adjectives thickly on her

finest tartines, and decorated them with a variety of her most pompous
epithets. It was an infringement of the copyright of the passages of

declamation that disfigure Corinne; but Louise grew so much the
greater in her own eyes as she talked, that she loved the Benjamin who

inspired her eloquence the more for it. She counseled him to take a
bold step and renounce his patronymic for the noble name of Rubempre;

he need not mind the little tittle-tattle over a change which the
King, for that matter, would authorize. Mme. de Bargeton undertook to

procure this favor; she was related to the Marquise d'Espard, who was
a Blamont-Chauvry before her marriage, and a persona grata at Court.

The words "King," "Marquise d'Espard," and "the Court" dazzled Lucien
like a blaze of fireworks, and the necessity of the baptism was plain

to him.
"Dear child," said Louise, with tender mockery in her tones, "the

sooner it is done, the sooner it will be sanctioned."
She went through social strata and showed the poet that this step

would raise him many rungs higher in the ladder. Seizing the moment,
she persuaded Lucien to forswear the chimerical notions of '89 as to

equality; she roused a thirst for social distinction allayed by
David's cool commonsense; she pointed out fashionable society as the

goal and the only stage for such a talent as his. The rabid Liberal
became a Monarchist in petto; Lucien set his teeth in the apple of

desire of rank, luxury, and fame. He swore to win a crown to lay at
his lady's feet, even if there should be blood-stains on the bays. He

would conquer at any cost, quibuscumque viis. To prove his courage, he
told her of his present way of life; Louise had known nothing of its

hardships, for there is an indefinable pudency inseparable from strong
feeling in youth, a delicacy which shrinks from a display of great

qualities; and a young man loves to have the real quality of his
nature discerned through the incognito. He described that life, the

shackles of poverty borne with pride, his days of work for David, his
nights of study. His young ardor recalled memories of the colonel of

six-and-twenty; Mme. de Bargeton's eyes grew soft; and Lucien, seeing
this weakness in his awe-inspiring mistress, seized a hand that she

had abandoned to him, and kissed it with the frenzy of a lover and a
poet in his youth. Louise even allowed him to set his eager, quivering

lips upon her forehead.
"Oh, child! child! if any one should see us, I should look very

ridiculous," she said, shaking off the ecstatic torpor.
In the course of that evening, Mme. de Bargeton's wit made havoc of

Lucien's prejudices, as she styled them. Men of genius, according to
her doctrine, had neither brothers nor sisters nor father nor mother;

the great tasks laid upon them required that they should sacrifice
everything that they might grow to their full stature. Perhaps their

families might suffer at first from the all-absorbing exactions of a
giant brain, but at a later day they were repaid a hundredfold for

self-denial of every kind during the early struggles of the kingly
intellect with adverse fate; they shared the spoils of victory. Genius

was answerable to no man. Genius alone could judge of the means used
to an end which no one else could know. It was the duty of a man of

genius, therefore, to set himself above law; it was his mission to
reconstruct law; the man who is master of his age may take all that he

needs, run any risks, for all is his. She quoted instances. Bernard