comparison,
even with the Court of Vienna, for in this the nobility of Besancon
would put the Viennese drawing-rooms to shame. As to Victor Hugo,
Nodier, Fourier, the glories of the town, they are never mentioned, no
one thinks about them. The marriages in these families are arranged in
the cradle, so rigidly are the greatest things settled as well as the
smallest. No stranger, no intruder, ever finds his way into one of these
houses, and to obtain an introduction for the colonels or officers of
title belonging to the first families in France when quartered there,
requires efforts of diplomacy which Prince Talleyrand would gladly have
mastered to use at a congress.

In 1834 Amedee was the only man in Besancon who wore trouser-straps;
this will account for the young man's being regarded as a lion. And a
little anecdote will enable you to understand the city of Besancon.

Some time before the opening of this story, the need arose at the
prefecture for bringing an editor from Paris for the official newspaper,
to enable it to hold its own against the little _Gazette_, dropped at
Besancon by the great _Gazette_, and the _Patriot_, which frisked in the
hands of the Republicans. Paris sent them a young man, knowing nothing
about la Franche Comte, who began by writing them a leading article of
the school of the _Charivari_. The chief of the moderate party, a member
of the municipal council, sent for the journalist and said to him,
"You must understand, monsieur, that we are serious, more than
serious--tiresome; we resent being amused, and are furious at
having been made to laugh. Be as hard of digestion as the toughest
disquisitions in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and you will hardly reach
the level of Besancon."

The editor took the hint, and thenceforth spoke the most
incomprehensible philosophical lingo. His success was complete.

If young Monsieur de Soulas did not fall in the esteem of Besancon
society, it was out of pure vanity on its part; the aristocracy were
happy to affect a modern air, and to be able to show any Parisians of
rank who visited the Comte a young man who bore some likeness to them.

All this hidden labor, all this dust thrown in people's eyes, this
display of folly and latent prudence, had an object, or the _lion_ of
Besancon would have been no son of the soil. Amedee wanted to achieve a
good marriage by proving some day that his farms were not mortgaged, and
that he had some savings. He wanted to be