ved added value from the splendid
setting which Philibert de Lorme seemed to have planned on purpose for
this museum, occupied her for several months, giving her leisure to
meditate one of those decisive steps that startle the public, ignorant
of the motives which, however, it sometimes discovers by dint of gossip
and suppositions.

Madame de la Baudraye had been greatly struck by the reputation of
Lousteau, who was regarded as a lady's man of the first water in
consequence of his intimacies among actresses; she was anxious to know
him; she read his books, and was fired with enthusiasm, less perhaps for
his talents than for his successes with women; and to attract him to the
country, she started the notion that it was obligatory on Sancerre to
return one of its great men at the elections. She made Gatien Boirouge
write to the great physician Bianchon, whom he claimed as a cousin
through the Popinots. Then she persuaded an old friend of the departed
Madame Lousteau to stir up the journalist's ambitions by letting him
know that certain persons in Sancerre were firmly bent on electing a
deputy from among the distinguished men in Paris.

Tired of her commonplace neighbors, Madame de la Baudraye would thus at
last meet really illustrious men, and might give her fall the lustre of
fame.

Neither Lousteau nor Bianchon replied; they were waiting perhaps till
the holidays. Bianchon, who had won his professor's chair the year
before after a brilliant contest, could not leave his lectures.

In the month of September, when the vintage was at its height, the two
Parisians arrived in their native province, and found it absorbed in the
unremitting toil of the wine-crop of 1836; there could therefore be
no public demonstration in their favor. "We have fallen flat," said
Lousteau to his companion, in the slang of the stage.

In 1836, Lousteau, worn by sixteen years of struggle in the Capital,
and aged quite as much by pleasure as by penury, hard work, and
disappointments, looked eight-and-forty, though he was no more than
thirty-seven. He was already bald, and had assumed a Byronic air in
harmony with his early decay and the lines furrowed in his face
by over-indulgence in champagne. He ascribed these signs-manual of
dissipation to the severities of a literary life, declaring that the
Press was murderous; and he gave it to be understood that it consumed
superior talents, so as to lend a grace to his exhaustion. In his native
town