plan which he had laid down, for he wished to appear as Mme. de
Bargeton's champion. Stanislas de Chandour held that Mme. de Bargeton

had not been cruel to her lover, and Amelie goaded them to argument,
for she longed to know the truth. Each stated his case, and (as not

unfrequently happens in small country towns) some intimate friends of
the house dropped in in the middle of the argument. Stanislas and

Chatelet vied with each other in backing up their opinions by
observations extremely pertinent. It was hardly to be expected that

the champions should not seek to enlist partisans. "What do you
yourself think?" they asked, each of his neighbor. These polemics kept

Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien well in sight.
At length one day Chatelet called attention to the fact that whenever

he went with M. de Chandour to Mme. de Bargeton's and found Lucien
there, there was not a sign nor a trace of anything suspicious; the

boudoir door stood open, the servants came and went, there was nothing
mysterious to betray the sweet crime of love, and so forth and so

forth. Stanislas, who did not lack a certain spice of stupidity in his
composition, vowed that he would cross the room on tiptoe the next

day, and the perfidious Amelie held him to his bargain.
For Lucien that morrow was the day on which a young man tugs out some

of the hairs of his head, and inwardly vows that he will give up the
foolish business of sighing. He was accustomed to his situation. The

poet, who had seated himself so bashfully in the boudoir-sanctuary of
the queen of Angouleme, had been transformed into an urgent lover. Six

months had been enough to bring him on a level with Louise, and now he
would fain be her lord and master. He left home with a settled

determination to be extravagant in his behavior; he would say that it
was a matter of life or death to him; he would bring all the resources

of torrid eloquence into play; he would cry that he had lost his head,
that he could not think, could not write a line. The horror that some

women feel for premeditation does honor to their delicacy; they would
rather surrender upon the impulse of passion, than in fulfilment of a

contract. In general, prescribed happiness is not the kind that any of
us desire.

Mme. de Bargeton read fixed purpose in Lucien's eyes and forehead, and
in the agitation in his face and manner, and proposed to herself to

baffle him, urged theretopartly by a spirit of contradiction, partly
also by an exalted conception of love. Being given to exaggeration,

she set an exaggerated value upon her person. She looked upon herself
as a sovereign lady, a Beatrice, a Laura. She enthroned herself, like

some dame of the Middle Ages, upon a dais, looking down upon the
tourney of literature, and meant that Lucien, as in duty bound, should

win her by his prowess in the field; he must eclipse "the sublime
child," and Lamartine, and Sir Walter Scott, and Byron. The noble

creature regarded her love as a stimulating power; the desire which
she had kindled in Lucien should give him the energy to win glory for

himself. This feminine Quixotry is a sentiment which hallows love and
turns it to worthy uses; it exalts and reverences love. Mme. de

Bargeton having made up her mind to play the part of Dulcinea in
Lucien's life for seven or eight years to come, desired, like many

other provincials, to give herself as the reward of prolonged service,
a trial of constancy which should give her time to judge her lover.

Lucien began the strife by a piece of vehement petulence, at which a
woman laughs so long as she is heart-free, and saddens only when she

loves; whereupon Louise took a lofty tone, and began one of her long
orations, interlarded with high-sounding words.

"Was that your promise to me, Lucien?" she said, as she made an end.
"Do not sow regrets in the present time, so sweet as it is, to poison

my after life. Do not spoil the future, and, I say it with pride, do
not spoil the present! Is not my whole heart yours? What more must you

have? Can it be that your love is influenced by the clamor of the
senses, when it is the noblest privilege of the beloved to silence

them? For whom do you take me? Am I not your Beatrice? If I am not
something more than a woman for you, I am less than a woman."

"That is just what you might say to a man if you cared nothing at all
for him," cried Lucien, frantic with passion.

"If you cannot feel all the sincere love underlying my ideas, you will
never be worthy of me."

"You are throwing doubts on my love to dispense yourself from
responding to it," cried Lucien, and he flung himself weeping at her

feet.
The poor boy cried in earnest at the prospect of remaining so long at

the gate of paradise. The tears of the poet, who feels that he is
humbled through his strength, were mingled with childish crying for a

plaything.
"You have never loved me!" he cried.

"You do not believe what you say," she answered, flattered by his
violence.

"Then give me proof that you are mine," said the disheveled poet.
Just at that moment Stanislas came up unheard by either of the pair.

He beheld Lucien in tears, half reclining on the floor, with his head
on Louise's knee. The attitude was suspicious enough to satisfy

Stanislas; he turned sharply round upon Chatelet, who stood at the
door of the salon. Mme. de Bargeton sprang up in a moment, but the

spies beat a precipate retreat like intruders, and she was not quick
enough for them.

"Who came just now?" she asked the servants.
"M. de Chandour and M. du Chatelet," said Gentil, her old footman.

Mme. de Bargeton went back, pale and trembling, to her boudoir.
"If they saw you just now, I am lost," she told Lucien.

"So much the better!" exclaimed the poet, and she smiled to hear the
cry, so full of selfish love.

A story of this kind is aggravated in the provinces by the way in
which it is told. Everybody knew in a moment that Lucien had been

detected at Nais feet. M. de Chandour, elated by the important part he
played in the affair, went first to tell the great news at the club,

and thence from house to house, Chatelet hastening to say that HE had
seen nothing; but by putting himself out of court, he egged Stanislas

on to talk, he drew him on to add fresh details; and Stanislas,
thinking himself very witty, added a little to the tale every time

that he told it. Every one flocked to Amelie's house that evening, for
by that time the most exaggerated versions of the story were in

circulation among the Angouleme nobility, every narrator having
followed Stanislas' example. Women and men were alike impatient to

know the truth; and the women who put their hands before their faces
and shrieked the loudest were none other than Mesdames Amelie,

Zephirine, Fifine, and Lolotte, all with more or less heavy
indictments of illicit love laid to their charge. There were

variations in every key upon the painful theme.
"Well, well," said one of the ladies, "poor Nais! have you heard about

it? I do not believe it myself; she has a whole blameless record
behind her; she is far too proud to be anything but a patroness to M.

Chardon. Still, if it is true, I pity her with all my heart."
"She is all the more to be pitied because she is making herself

frightfully ridiculous; she is old enough to be M. Lulu's mother, as
Jacques called him. The little poet it twenty-two at most; and Nais,

between ourselves, is quite forty."
"For my own part," said M. du Chatelet, "I think that M. de Rubempre's

position in itself proves Nais' innocence. A man does not go down on
his knees to ask for what he has had already."

"That is as may be!" said Francis, with levity that brought
Zephirine's disapproving glance down on him.

"Do just tell us how it really was," they besought Stanislas, and
formed a small, secret committee in a corner of the salon.

Stanislas, in the long length, had put together a little story full of
facetious suggestions, and accompanied it with pantomime, which made

the thing prodigiously worse.
"It is incredible!"

"At midday?"
"Nais was the last person whom I should have suspected!"