rt of
the session of the House of Peers, he requested his wife to reserve for
him a little suite of rooms in an _entresol_ over the kitchens.

"Bless me! why, he is growing young again--a gentleman!--a
magnifico!--What will he become next? It is quite alarming," said Madame
de la Baudraye.

"He now fulfils all your wishes at the age of twenty," replied the
lawyer.

The comparison of her future prospects with her present position was
unendurable to Dinah. Only the day before, Anna de Fontaine had
turned her head away in order to avoid seeing her bosom friend at the
Chamarolles' school.

"I am a countess," said Dinah to herself. "I shall have the peer's blue
hammer-cloth on my carriage, and the leaders of the literary world in my
drawing-room--and I will look at her!"--And it was this little triumph
that told with all its weight at the moment of her rehabilitation, as
the world's contempt had of old weighed on her happiness.

One fine day, in May 1842, Madame de la Baudraye paid all her little
household debts and left a thousand crowns on top of the packet of
receipted bills. After sending her mother and the children away to the
Hotel de la Baudraye, she awaited Lousteau, dressed ready to leave the
house. When the deposed king of her heart came into dinner, she said:

"I have upset the pot, my dear. Madame de la Baudraye requests the
pleasure of your company at the _Rocher de Cancale_."

She carried off Lousteau, quite bewildered by the light and easy manners
assumed by the woman who till that morning has been the slave of his
least whim, for she too had been acting a farce for two months past.

"Madame de la Baudraye is figged out as if for a first night," said
he--_une premiere_, the slang abbreviation for a first performance.

"Do not forget the respect you owe to Madame de la Baudraye," said Dinah
gravely. "I do not mean to understand such a word as _figged out_."

"Didine a rebel!" said he, putting his arm round her waist.

"There is no such person as Didine; you have killed her, my dear," she
replied, releasing herself. "I am taking you to the first performance of
_Madame la Comtesse de la Baudraye_."

"It is true, then, that our insect is a peer of France?"

"The nomination is to be gazetted in this evening's _Moniteur_, as I am
told by Monsieur de Clagny, who is promoted to the Court of Appeal."

"Well, it is quite right," said the journalist. "The entomology of
society ought to be represented